Chapter VI: Part 6

The city proper enchants with its bewildering jumbles of architecture, its historical evocations. The Bridge of Prague, the Town Hall, the Powder Tower, the historic Tyn church, the old Jewish cemetery, the Belvedere, the Chapel of St. Wenceslas, the shrine of St. Nepomuc, the Star Hunting Lodge, where in 1620 was fought the Battle of the White Mountain, the Rudolphinium—to go on like this would send you to the guide-books. There is the modern Representatives House, where you may enjoy a symphony concert up-stairs, while in the restaurant on the first floor you can eat an omleba royal, a Fogos fish, a Telec filet specanky and Ledovy crème, ending with an Americky compôte, and—tell it not in Gath—good light wine is to be had, or the incomparable product of Pilsen, there pronounced Pizn. I stopped at the “Blauer Stern,” on the Hybernska Ulice, which old-fashioned, comfortable hotel has probably changed its name since the war. Even in 1913 anything German was anathema to the Bohemians. There is the Bohemian National Theatre. Both Josef Stransky of the Philharmonic Society and Artur Bodanzky of the Metropolitan Opera House and the New Symphony Orchestra were some years ago conductors at Prague. One afternoon in the Representatives House I listened to a programme composed of national music—the Scherzo à Capriccioso of Dvorak, a symphony by Smetana, a symphonic poem by Josef Suk and a work by Sdenko Fibich, the latter a composer too little known here, whose piano compositions were introduced to us more than a decade ago by Florence Mosher and Emily Burbank at their lecture-recitals. One gray morning I went astray while wandering about the twisting corridors of the “Blauer Stern” and, tempted by the sounds of masterly violin playing, I stood before a door which bore the legend: “Otokar Sevcik.” It might have been his pupils, Jan Kubelik or Kocian, though it was neither. I had seen the brilliant Kubelik at Marienbad, where I went annually to fight my fat and also to war with the rum demon—temporarily. Since then Sevcik, the great teacher of aspiring fiddlers, has removed to Vienna.

I mention these things concerning the delightful city of Ema Destinova, Thomas Masaryk—who married a New York lady, one of the Misses Garrigue of the well-known musical family; of the city wherein Mozart composed his masterpiece, Don Giovanni—“in order to express the thanks of the great master to his ‘dearest citizens of Prague’ for their ardent reception”; that Prague which is so dramatic to gaze upon, the Slavic city further west, the gateway to the Slavic lands—because I have just read with considerable satisfaction a slender pamphlet of fifty pages entitled The Music of Bohemia, by Ladislav Urban, published under the auspices of the Czecho-Slovak Art Clubs of New York City. The author calls his decidedly interesting contribution a sketch, but it is a sketch in which is compressed much valuable matter. At the start he tells us that “Czech” is the Slav name for the Slav people and language in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia. The terms used to designate the whole country, the state, are ‘Bohemia’ and ‘Bohemian.’ The Czechs themselves do not employ this distinction, continues Mr. Urban, but use the word Czech in both senses. Slovaks are that people who live in the northwestern part of Hungary, called Slovakia, which with Bohemia forms the present republic and nation of the Czecho-Slovaks. Mr. Urban warns us not to confound Bohemians and gypsies, and cites Balfe’s Bohemian Girl as an instance: a full-fledged Czech folk-melody is introduced as a gypsy tune in the allegro theme of the overture.

There has been bad blood between the Bohemians and Germans since the reign of King Wenceslas (921-935 A. D.). After his assassination, Wenceslas was canonized and is a national saint; a folk-song, known as the Choral of St. Wenceslas, is one of the oldest among its kind. The John Huss reformation also aroused the nation, and a battle hymn, “Ye warriors who for God are fighting,” was another product of the folk. Bohemia has always been a musical nation, as Mr. Urban proves by numerous citations. Its folk-song literature is rich and varied. He quotes from Seth Watson’s Racial Problems in Hungary: “Singing is the chief passion of the Slovaks. Nothing will find its way so surely to the heart of the Slovak people as a well-sung song. An old peasant woman once complained to a friend of mine that her son was a useless, disappointing fellow. ‘What was the matter?’ inquired my friend; ‘did he drink or would he not work?’ ‘Oh, no,’ said the old woman; ‘but nothing will make him sing. It’s a great misfortune.’” Rather a companionable sort, we think—a young man who doesn’t sing, whistle or make other disagreeable noises would be a prize in our noisy Tophet of New York.

The polka must be credited to Bohemia; it was invented about 1830 by a country girl. This sounds a trifle doubtful, as the dance—called polka, rather pulka, because of the half step—is as old as the immemorial hills of Bohemia, I have been informed by Bohemian critics. There is a polka in Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, also a furiant, which means, we are told, “a boasting farmer.” Dvorak in his first symphony introduces a furiant in the place of a scherzo. But Mr. Urban is not seduced into that most platitudinous of errors, to wit, that the people make a nation’s music. He writes with admirable clearness on the subject: “It is no wonder that the richness of folk-art was overestimated in Bohemia at the beginning of the last century, and led to an error. Folk-art was confused with nationality in art. A false principle was constructed that ‘national art’ must be based upon folk-music. Thus the imitation of folk-poetry and folk-melodies was approved as the real national art. It is astonishing how long this principle, violating, as it did, the national law of progress, could endure. All works of this feverish, would-be-national period belong to history. They live no more, being but imitations.” In a footnote to this inexpugnable statement the author adds with his accustomed acuity: “The matter was also discussed in America, where some people saw national American music under the guise of Indian music. Nothing is easier for a composer than to imitate the melodies of different nations, preserving their rhythmical or melodic mannerisms.” He might have joined negro to Indian as our national, so-called, musical characteristics. But there are no more Indians, in a tribal sense, and as to negro music, the best of it was composed by white men, notably Stephen Foster. Why should Afro-American folk-tunes represent America? In MacDowell’s Indian Suite there are authentic Indian themes, while in Dvorak’s From the New World the negroid tunes are mere suggestions; the rhythms of Yankee Doodle are faintly heard as a contrapuntal device; in a word, the Americanism of Dr. Dvorak’s plenary composition is as American as his own name, not to mention the fact that its chief motto is taken from Schubert’s unfinished symphony (Tchaikovsky went to the same source for the principal theme of his E minor, the fifth, symphony, hence the accusation that Dvorak borrowed from the Russian. Arcades ambo!) But the negro folk-tune as a basic element for the American composer was short-lived. Its logical conclusion landed us in the dubious and never delectable region of ragtime, and there let it lie forever. The musical culture of America must have its roots in more national soil, must stem from neither the aboriginal natives nor yet from the one-time slaves. It must be American or it will not be at all. At present our supreme composer is Charles Martin Loeffler, by virtue of his individual genius. I suspect all map-music; patriotism may cloak humbuggery—or worse (Dr. Johnson says it does). So let us first make good music, and the national ingredients will take care of themselves.

Mr. Urban devoted special sections to the chief composers of Bohemia—Bedrich Smetana, Antonin Dvorak, Zdenko Fibich, Vitezslav Novak, and Josef Suk. There are, of course, many others, but within the scope of his little study these five suffice. Naturally, the palm of superiority is awarded Smetana, whose music we heard last season, thanks to Josef Stransky, himself a Bohemian. Smetana is the Bohemian composer par excellence. There is a foreign alloy in Dvorak, especially the later Dvorak, that rules him from entering into competition with his fellow-countryman. Dvorak remained a peasant even in his best works, which were written before he came to New York in 1892. The New World Symphony is pleasing and wears well, notwithstanding its unblushing plagiarisms—that excerpt from the Venusberg bacchanale in Tannhäuser quite takes your breath away; quotation marks are sadly needed in music!—but it remains presumably Czechish, and only faintly American. We much prefer his earlier Slavic Dances, the orchestral scherzo and the Husitzka overture. As for the newer men, it is to be hoped that Bodanzky and Stransky and Stokowski—conductors nowadays seem to be sky-high—will give them all a hearing. Quality, not quantity, rules Bohemian music, a music racy of the national soil, nevertheless not without the larger, profounder accents of universal music.

THE MUSIC OF YESTERDAY?

Notwithstanding the fact that he played the flute and ranked Rossini above Wagner, Arthur Schopenhauer said some notable things about music. Here is a wise observation of his: “Art is ever on the quest, a quest and a divine adventure;” although this restless search for the new often ends in plain reaction, progress may be crabwise and still be progress. We fear “progress,” as usually understood, is a glittering “general idea” that blinds many to the truth. Reform in art is like reform in politics. You can’t reform the St. Matthew Passion music or the fifth symphony. Is Parsifal a reformation of Gluck? This talk of reforms is confusing the historic with the æsthetic. Art is a tricksy quantity and, like quicksilver, is ever mobile. As in all genuine revolutions, the personal equation counts the heaviest, so in dealing with the conditions of music at the present time we ought to study the temperament of our music-makers and let prophecy sulk in its tent as it may.

One thing is certain: The old tonal order has changed forever; there are plenty of signs and wonders in the musical firmament to prove this. Moussorgsky preceded Debussy in his use of whole-tone harmonies, and a contemporary of Debussy and an equally gifted musician, Charles Martin Loeffler, was experimenting before Debussy in a dark but delectable harmonic region. The tyranny of the diatonic and chromatic scales, the tiresome revolution of the major and minor modes, the critical Canutes who sit at the edge of the musical sea and say to the modern waves, “Thus far and no further!” and then hastily abandon their thrones and rush to safety, else to be overwhelmed—all these are of the past, whether in art, literature, music, or—let Nietzsche speak—in ethics. Even philosophy has changed its garb and logic is “a dodge,” as Prof. Jowett used to say. Every stronghold is being assailed, from the “divine” rights of property to the common chord of C major.

If Ruskin had written music-criticism he might have amplified the connotations of his famous phrase, the “pathetic fallacy,” for we consider it a pathetic fallacy (though not in the Ruskinian sense) in criticism to be overshadowed by the fear that, because some of our predecessors misjudged Wagner, Manet and Ibsen, we should be too tender in our judgments of our contemporaries. Here is “the pathos of distance” run to seed. The music of to-day may be the music of to-morrow, but if not, what then? It may satisfy the emotional needs of the moment, yet become a stale formula to-morrow. What does that prove? Though Bach and Beethoven built their work on the broad bases of eternity—employing that tremendous term in a limited sense; no art is “eternal”—nevertheless, one may enjoy the men whose music is of slight texture and “modern.” Nor is this a plea for mediocrity. Mediocrity we shall always have with us; mediocrity is mankind in the normal, and normal man demands of art what he can read without running, hear without thinking. Every century produces artists who are forgotten in a generation, though they fill the ear for a time with their clever production. This has led to another general idea, that of transition, of intermediate types. But after critical perspective has been attained, it will be seen that the majority of composers fall into this category of the transitional; not a consoling notion, but an unavoidable conclusion. Richard Wagner had his epigones. And so had Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. Mendelssohn was a feminine variation of Bach, and after Schumann followed Brahms—Brahms, who threatens to rival his great exemplar. Yet I can recall the incredulous smiles when, twenty-five years ago, I called the Brahms compositions “The Music of the Future.”

The Wagner-Liszt tradition of music-drama and the symphonic poem have been continued with personal modifications by Richard Strauss. Max Reger pinned his faith to Brahms and absolute music, though not without an individual variation. In considering his Sinfonietta, the Serenade, the Hiller Variations, the Prologue to a Tragedy, the Lustspiel overture, the two concertos respectively for pianoforte and violin, we are struck not so much by the masterly handling of old forms as by the stark, emotional content of these compositions. It is an error to dismiss his music as merely academic. He began as a Brahmsianer, but he did not succeed, as did his master, in fusing form and theme. There is a Dionysian strain in him that too often is in jarring discord with the intellectual structure of his work. The furor teutonicus in conflict with the scholar. Yet at one period Reger was considered the rival of Strauss, though that day has long passed. Arnold Schoenberg now divides the throne. And there were many other claimants—Rezinek, d’Albert, Ernest Boehe, Walter Braunfels, Max Schillings, Hans Pfitzner, Klose, Ehrenberg, Noren, Franz Schreker, and the younger choir whose doings are analyzed weekly by clever Cezar Searchinger in the pages of the _Musical Courier_. Their name is legion. They enter the lists sounding golden trumpets of self-praise and are usually forgotten after a solitary performance of their huge machines, whether opera or symphony. Size seems to be the prime requisite. Write a music-drama that consumes three nights in its performance, a symphony that takes a hundred men, with a chorus of a thousand, to play and sing. Behold! You are a modern among moderns. But your name is as mud the following year. Exceptions are Mahler and Bruckner, yet I have my suspicions that when the zeal of William Mengelberg has abated, then the Mahler craze will go the way of all flesh, despite the fact that he has composed some thrilling pages. Otherwise, his symphonic structures are too mastodonic to endure; like those of Berlioz, they are top-heavy with ennui, and many chambers are empty of significant ideas or vital emotions. Musical intellectualism at its extreme Kamchatska.

Our personal preferences incline us to the new French music. To be sure, substance is often lacking, but you are not oppressed by the abomination of desolation which lurks in the merely huge, by what Mr. Finck calls Jumboism in music. The formal clarity, the charming color sense, the sprightly, even joyful, spirit, combined with an audacious roving among revolutionary ideas, all endear these youngsters to us. Debussy is their artistic sire, Ravel their stepfather, and if d’Indy does not fall into this category, being a descendant of Franck, he is none the less admirable as a musician. Stravinsky outpoints them all in the imprévu, as does the incredible Prokofieff—a man to be carefully estimated, one who thus far hasn’t put his best foot foremost in America. The Richard Strauss case is no longer a moot one. He has in all probability given his best work, and superlative work it is, despite its slag, scoriæ, rubble, and refuse. He is the chief of a school, a position from which he can never be dislodged, and when history sifts the pretensions of all the second and third rate men of his generation, his figure will be found standing close to Wagner’s and Berlioz’s and Liszt’s. An epigone? Yes. But an epigone of individual genius.

With Arnold Schoenberg freedom in modulation is not only permissible but an iron rule; he is obsessed by the theory of overtones, and his music is not only planned horizontally and vertically but in a circular fashion. There is in his philosophy no such thing as consonance or dissonance, only perfect ear training. (We quote from his Harmony; a Bible for Supermen). He writes: “Harmonie fremde Tone gibt es also nicht”—and a sly dig at old-timers—“sondern nur dem Harmonie-system fremde.” After carefully listening to his “chaos” a certain order disengages itself; his madness is methodical. For one thing, he abuses the interval of the fourth and he enjoys juggling with the chord of the ninth. Vagabond harmonies in which remotest keys lovingly hold hands do not dissipate the sensation of a central tonality somewhere—the cellar, on the roof, in the gutter, up above in the sky so high. The inner ear tells you that his D minor quartet is really thought, though not altogether played, in that key. As for form, you must not expect it from a man who has declared: “I decide my form during composition only through feeling,” a procedure which in other composers’ works might be called improvisation. Every chord is the outcome of an emotion, the emotion aroused by the poem or idea which gives birth to the composition. Such antique things as the cyclic form or community of themes are not to be found in Schoenberg’s bright lexicon of anarchy. He boils down the classic sonata form to one movement and begins developing his theme as soon as it is announced. We should be grateful that he announces it at all; themeless music is the rage at present.

So, as it may be seen, the new dogmatism is more dogmatic than the old. The absence of rule in Schoenberg is an inflexible, cast-iron law of necessity as tyrannical as the Socialism that has replaced Czarism with a more oppressive autocracy, the rule of the unwashed, many-headed monster. Better one tyrant than a million. There is no music of yesterday or to-morrow. There is only the music of Now.

LISZT’S ONLY PIANO SONATA

That two young American-born pianists, John Powell and Louis Cornell, should have selected recently Liszt’s only piano sonata for their programmes, and during the same week, is sufficiently significant to call for comment. It is a sign of the times. Many of the innovations in modern writing for the instrument may be directly traced to this same B minor sonata, and when we name it as the composer’s solitary excursion into the classical domain, it is with full consciousness that Liszt’s “fantasia quasi-sonata,” after a reading of Dante, in Années de Pèlerinage, is hardly to be described as a sonata. What is a sonata? Liszt answers the question in his highly original work. He rejects the old order of three or four separate movements, substituting a more complete organism. It may not be, formally speaking, the Haydn, Mozart, or early Beethoven sonata. Liszt employs as a spring-board the last sonatas of Beethoven to launch him into novel territory (study opus 110 in A flat and you will recognize the truth of this contention).

Charles Souilier has declared that the sonata expired with the eighteenth century, which gave it birth. This is a rather risky statement. If true, we should have missed such beautiful music in the form—Schumann, Chopin, Brahms, Liszt. The Hungarian’s astonishing use of the leading-movement and its metamorphosis, one theme of the slow introduction, as Shedlock, in his book on The Pianoforte Sonata, is the source whence he derives the principal part of his tone picture, and, adds Mr. Shedlock, “everything depends on the quality and latent power of the fertilizing germ.” But on the first page of the B minor sonata may be found Wotan’s chief theme, the scream of Kundry, and a color scheme which Wagner later incorporated in the Ring and Parsifal. So the “fertilizing germ” is not missing. As for the form, that is easily discernible. Liszt has spun a complex web, his sonata is an arabesque, and a logical one, for nothing is more inexorably logical than a seemingly loose rhapsody. The chief fault of this composition is not its form or lack of melodic invention, but its length—it demands at least thirty-five minutes to play—caused by repetitions, though in different keys, thus defeating the very purpose for which it was composed, _i. e._, suppression of unnecessary episodes and breaks in the continuity. The same criticism holds good for the Symphonic Poems.

Liszt’s influence was not only profound upon his contemporaries—witness Wagner—but on the latter-day school, headed by Richard Strauss, whose tone poems are inconceivable without Liszt’s discoveries. He also inspired the Russians, and his impressionism is the base of Debussy and Ravel’s piano music. Rimsky-Korsakoff we long ago christened the Russian Berlioz, yet he owes Liszt more; from Berlioz he learned how to paint orchestrally, but in his manner of composition he leans heavily on the Hungarian. Sadko comes from Liszt’s symphonic poem, Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne, while Antar and Scheherazade come from Harold and the Faust symphony. As a French critic has written: “The brand of Liszt remains ineffaceable” on those charming works of Rimsky-Korsakoff. Like Moses, Liszt saw the Promised Land, but was destined never to enter it. He suffered the fate of intermediate types. He was recognized too late. Dr. Frederick Niecks, the biographer of Chopin, has wisely said: “Be, however, the ultimate fate of his works what it may, there will always remain to Liszt the fame of a daring striver, a fruitful originator, and a wide-ranging quickener.”

The eminently pianistic quality of Liszt’s original music commends it to every pianist. Joseffy told the present writer that the B minor sonata was one of those compositions that plays itself, it “lies” so beautifully for the hand. No work of Liszt, with the possible exception of his études, is as interesting. Agreeing with those critics who declare that they find few traces of the sonata form in the structure, and also with those who assert the work to be an organic amplification of the old obsolete form, and that Liszt has taken Beethoven’s last sonata period as a starting-point for his plunge into futurity—agreeing with these warring factions, we find fascinating music in this sonata. What a dramatic work it is! It stirs the blood. It is intense. It is complex. The opening bars are truly Lisztian. The gloom, the harmonic haze from which emerges that bold theme in octaves (Wotan’s theme), the leap from C to the A sharp below—how Liszt has stamped this and the succeeding intervals as his own! Power there is, sardonic power, like the first phrase of the E flat piano concerto, so cynically mocking. How incisively the composer traps your consciousness in the theme of the sonata, with its four knocking D’s! What follows might be a drama enacted in the netherworld. Is there a composer who paints the infernal, the macabre, with more suggestive realism than Liszt? Berlioz and Saint-Saëns and Raff come to the mind as masters of the grisly and supernatural. But the thin, sharp flames of hell hover about the brass, wood-wind, and shrieking strings in the Liszt orchestra.

The chorale, usually the meat of the Lisztian composition, now appears and in dogmatic affirmation proclaims the religious belief of the composer; our convictions are swept along until after that outburst in C major, when follows the insincerity of it all in the harmonic sequences. Here, surely, it is not a whole-hearted belief, only theatric attudinizing; after the faint return of the first motive is heard the sigh of sentiment, of passion, of abandonment, which engenders the suspicion that when Liszt was not kneeling in prayer he was prostrate before woman. He blends piety and passion in the most mystically amorous fashion; with the cantando expressivo in D begins some lovely music, secular in spirit, mayhap intended by its creator for reredos and pyx.

But the rustle of silken attire is behind every bar; sensuous imagery, a delicate perfume of femininity lurks in each trill and cadence. Ah! naughty Abbé, have a care! After all thy tonsures and chorales, thy credos and sackcloth, wilt thou admit the Evil One in the guise of a melody, in whose chromatic intervals lie dimpled cheek and sunny tresses! Wilt thou permit her to make away with thy spiritual resolutions? Vade retro me Sathanas! And behold it is accomplished. The bold theme, so triumphantly proclaimed at the outset, is now solemnly sounded with choric pomp and power. Then begins the hue and cry of diminished sevenths, and this tonal panorama with its swirl of intoxicating colons kaleidoscopically moves onward. Again the devil tempts our musical St. Antony, this time in octaves and in the key of A major. He momentarily succumbs, but that good old family chorale is repeated, and even if its orthodoxy is faulty in spots it serves its purpose; the Satan is routed and early piety breaks forth in an alarming fugato, which, like the domestic ailment known as a bad conscience, is happily short-winded. Another flank movement of the Eternal Feminine, this time in the seductive key of B, made mock of by this musical Samson, who in stretta quasi presto views his weakness with contrapuntal glee. He shakes it from him, and in the bass triplets frames it as a picture to weep or rage over.

All this finally leads to prestissimo finale of startling splendor. In the literature of the piano there is nothing more exciting. It is brilliantly captivating, and Liszt the Magnificent is painted on every bar. What gorgeous swing and how the very bases of the musical anvil tremble under the sledge-hammer blows of this tonal Attila. Then follow a few bars of the Beethoven-andante, a moving return to the earlier themes, and softly the first lento descends to the subterranean abode, whence it emerges, a Magyar Wotan, majestically vanishing not in the mists of Valhalla but in the bowels of Gehenna; then a genuine Lisztian chord-sequence followed by a profound stillness in the major. The B minor sonata displays Liszt’s power, Liszt’s weakness. It is rhapsodic, it is too long—infernal, not a “heavenly length”—it is noble, drastic, cerebral, and it is blazing with exotic hues. It is also cynical and insincere. Liszt, more than other composers, Meyerbeer and Berlioz excepted, excelled in depicting a sneering, cynical sensuality. Also insincerity. And when you come to think it over, it takes genius to suggest in tones the insincere. This feat Liszt achieved. In his symphony to Faust he succeeds better with the Mephisto picture than in his characterization of Marguerite. But to deny the B minor sonata a commanding position in the Pantheon of piano music would be folly. And interpreted by an artist saturated in the Liszt tradition, such as Arthur Friedheim—who has intellectual power and never resorts to mere sentimentalism—the work almost compasses the sublime.

Away from the glitter of the concert-room this extraordinary Hungarian, inspired after the loftiest in art, yet in the atmosphere of aristocratic salons, or of the papal court, Liszt was not altogether admirable. We have heard certain cries calling heaven to witness that he was anointed of the Lord (which he was not); also that if he had not cut and run to sanctuary to escape the petticoats—one was his egregious Polish Princess—we might never have heard of Liszt the Abbé. This theory is not far from the truth. Among the various penalties undergone by genius is its pursuit by gibes and glossaries. Like Ibsen and Maeterlinck, the composer Liszt has had many things read into his music which do not belong there. He set great store by his sacred compositions, his masses and his psalms, and he was bitterly disappointed because Rome did not espouse his reforms in churchly music, notwithstanding his close friendship with Pope Pius IX. But there is a vein of insincerity running throughout this music, despite its ecclesiastic pomp and operatic coloring. Perhaps the best estimate of Franz Liszt is the purely human one. He was a virile musical genius, and was compact of the usual pleasing and unpleasing faults and virtues as is any great man not born of a book.

DREAMING OF LISZT

Philip Hale once wrote that they buried Richard Wagner in the back yard like a cat; which is irreverent yet a bald statement of the fact. Liszt is also buried at Baireuth, in a forlorn pagoda designed by his grandson, Siegfried Wagner, who, at the time of his grandfather’s death, was a student of architecture. After a pilgrimage to this tomb in the cemetery in the Erlangerstrasse, for I count myself among the Lisztianer, and also after hearing several operas of Siegfried I reached the conclusion that, notwithstanding critical opinion to the contrary, the young man wisely abandoned his architectural dreams. But it is another kind of dream that I would describe this Sunday morning. When a young chap, I was crazy to see, to hear, Liszt, and while I think that the old man with long white hair and warts on his face was the real Liszt—I met him on the Rue de Rivoli in 1878—still the possibility of a closer view haunted my sleeping and waking hours, and, finally armed with letters of introduction from a well-known French pianist, a pupil of the musical Merlin, and a Paris music publisher, I found myself one evening at the Gare de l’Est, en route for Strasburg, thence to Stuttgart, and Weimar. In those times, forty years ago, we travelled slowly.

A lovely morning in May saw me walking through a sun-smitten lane on the road to the garden-house where his Serene Highness was living. I had sent my introductions to the royal household the previous evening. I had been summoned. The hedges were white with spring blossoms, the air redolent of bockbier. Ah! thronging memories of youth. Suddenly a man on horseback, his face red with excitement, his beast covered with lather, dashed by, shouting, “Make way for the Master. He comes. He comes!” Presently a venerable being with a purple nose—a Cyrano de Cognac nose—appeared, and walking. His hair streamed in the wind. He wore a monkish habit, and on his head was a huge shovel-shaped hat of the pattern affected by Don Basilio in The Barber of Seville. “It must be Liszt or the Devil,” I cried, and the only Liszt smiled, his warts growing more purple, his expression most benignant. He waved to me a friendly hand, that formidable hand, which, like a steam-hammer, could crush steel or crack the shell of an egg, so sensitive was it. “Both Liszt and the Devil,” he grunted, and then I knew my man. I kissed his hand, made the sign of the cross, for I was addressing an ecclesiastic, an Abbé, though one without a tonsure, and created a deacon by Pope Pius IX, called Pio Nono in Italy, but in Rome affectionately nicknamed “Pianino” because of his love of piano music, Liszt’s in particular.

He invited me to refreshments at the Czerny Café, but as it was crowded we went across the street to the garden of the Elephant Hotel, there to be surrounded by a throng of little Liszts, pupils, male and female, who mimicked the old, old gentleman in an absurd manner. They wore their hair on their shoulders, they sprinkled this hair with flour, they even went so far as to paint purplish excrescences on their chins and brows. They donned semi-sacerdotal robes, they held their hands in the peculiar style of the Master; they, too, sported shovel-shaped hats, and from time to time they indulged in patibulary gestures. But, good Lord, how they could down the beer!

Enfin, after some diplomatic skirmishing I was invited to the afternoon musicale and went with the gang to the pretty little home of Liszt in the ducal park. Liszt was amiable. He knew that I was nervous, so he asked a few promising young beginners, such as Arthur Friedheim, Alfred Reisenauer, Moriz Rosenthal, Emil Sauer, Richard Burmeister, to open the ball. After I heard them I wished myself in Buxtehude. I had proclaimed myself as an ardent upholder of the Thalberg school, which champions a singing touch and pearly scales. I had studied all the Thalberg fantasies on operatic airs with Charles H. Jarvis of Philadelphia, who could read prima vista any music composed by man, god, or devil. You will estimate my musical and intellectual equipment of those days when I tell you that my battle-horse was the Prayer from Moses in Egypt, arranged by Thalberg, and my favorite reading the prose of Chateaubriand; in few words, lush, luxuriant, and overblown romanticism. The step to Ouida’s novels and the Henselt études was not far. All that I detest now in music and literature was then my passion. Like Ephraim I was sealed to my idols, and the chiefest was Thalberg, natural son of Prince Lichtenstein, a handsome piano virtuoso with aristocratic side-whiskers, a smooth pianistic style, and a euphonious touch.

Liszt called to me. “Tiens! let us hear some music by an admirer of my old friend Sigismund Thalberg.” I did not miss the veiled irony of the speech, the slight underlining of “friend,” for I had read of the historical Liszt-Thalberg duel in Paris during the third decade of the last century. But memories soon annulled my agony. What a via dolorosa I traversed from my chair to the piano—by the way, a Steinway concert-grand. I shall not forget to my dying hour that chamber wherein I stood the most fateful afternoon of my life. Liszt, with his powerful profile of an Indian chieftain, lounged in the window embrasure, the light streaking his hair, silhouetting his brow, nose, and projecting chin. He was the illuminated focus of a picture that is burnt into my memory cells. The pupils were wraiths floating in a misty dream, with malicious points of light for eyes. I, too, felt like a disembodied being in this spectral atmosphere of which Liszt was the living reality.

Urged by a hypnotic will I went to the piano, sat before it, and in my nervous misery lifted the fall-board and paused to decipher the name of its maker; that’s how I discovered Steinway. My act did not pass unperceived. Whispering ensued, followed chuckling, and some one said: “He must have begun as a piano salesman.” It was the voice of the witty Rosenthal, and it utterly disconcerted me. Facing me on the wall was Ary Scheffer’s portrait of Chopin, and doubtless prompted by the subject, my fingers groped among the keys and I began, without rhyme or reason, the weaving prelude in D of the immortal Pole. My insides were shaking like a bowl of disturbed jelly, though outwardly I was as calm as growing grass. Oddly enough my hands did not falter, the music seemed to ooze from my wrists. I had not studied in vain Thalberg’s Art of Singing on the Pianoforte. I finished. Not a murmur was heard. Then Liszt’s voice cut the sultry air: “I had expected Thalberg’s tremolo study,” he casually remarked, avenging himself with an epigram on his old rival a half century after their battles. But Thalberg didn’t hear it. I did. I took the hint and bowed myself out of the royal presence, permitted by the boss to kiss his technique-laden fingers, and without stopping for my hat and walking-stick in the ante-chamber I went away. Then tempted by the cool of the woods I strayed across to Goethe’s Garden House. At the moment I preferred poetry to music. Nevertheless, I had played for Liszt. Rotten playing, of course, yet a historical fact. But when I compiled a life of the Grand Old Man of Hungary I hadn’t the courage to put my name in that long list of reputed pupils, though I dare say I didn’t play any worse than some of them. Ask Arthur Friedheim.

My hat and stick I sent for. I was not precisely in a jubilant mood, though I joined the Liszt lobby that night at the Hotel “Zum Elefanten.” It was a goodly crowd, the majority of whom achieved musical fame later. In the Weimar of those days Liszt walked and talked, smoked big black cigars, drank his share of brandy, played, composed, and prayed—he seldom missed early mass. Despite his Hungarian origin, his early French training, there emerged through the palimpsest of his brilliant and complex personality the characteristics of his mother, an Austrian born. He loved German music, German ways. He liked to speak that tongue in preference to French. Of the Magyar language he knew little. But his music is Hungarian enough; Hungarian in the sense that Tchaikovsky’s is Russian—_i. e._, cosmopolitan. However, there’s a lot of nonsense written about that fetish of a certain critical school, the fetish of nationalism in music. Liszt would have been invincibly Liszt even if he had been born in Boston. And that tropically passionate town does not in the least resemble Budapest.

At the Liszt museum his old housekeeper Paulina Apel—I must ask Albert Morris Bagby if she still lives—showed me its numerous memorials. What a collection of trophies, jewels, manuscripts, orders, pictures, letters, and testimonials from all over the globe. I read a letter from Charles Baudelaire to Liszt, which is not to be found in the volume dedicated to his correspondence. Gifts from royalty abound. In glass cases are the scores of Christus, the Faust Symphony, Orpheus, Hungaria, the Berg Symphony, Totentanz, and Festklaenge. Besides the Steinway in the music-room there was an old instrument dating back to the forties; for the little piano upon which he studied as a child you must go to the Budapest museum. At Weimar may be seen marble hands of Liszt’s, Beethoven’s, and Chopin’s; also the long, nervous, spider-like fingers of Liszt clasping the slender hand of the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein. Like Chopin, Liszt attracted princesses and other exalted personages in petticoats as does sugar buzzing flies.

And then I woke up. I had been dreaming in my Parisian attic in 1878. When I went for the first time to Weimar in 1896 Liszt had been dead ten years.

A BRAHMA OF THE KEYBOARD

In a half-forgotten study of Flaubert’s masterpiece, L’Education Sentimentale, which he rightly calls A Tragic Novel, George Moore compares the great Frenchman to Brahma “creating the passing spectacle of life to relieve his eternal ennui.”... Now, Leopold Godowsky is not Brahma, and he has never suffered from ennui, thanks to his tremendous capacity for work; yet I can’t help picturing him as a sort of impassive Asiatic deity seated before the keyboard of his instrument calmly surveying the eternal spectacle of music and its many masques. All schools, all styles, he knows, but upon this vast knowledge he has no desire to make any personal comment. Passionless, passionate, objective and subjective, his crystal-clear comprehension of the musical universe has made him apparently assume the attitude of an omniscient spectator, though he is neither one nor the other. Louis Ehlert asked Karl Tausig—probably the greatest of all piano virtuosi—why he did not offer up a small sacrifice to the human needs of the masses. The Pole replied: “I am not sentimental; neither my life nor my education intended me to be so.” Ehlert persisted. “How would it be if you were to give us an historical representation of the sentimental?” he suggested. Tausig shook his head and shrewdly smiled. He never made concessions to public taste, and he was called inhuman, cold, objective. His master, Liszt, was the reverse, overflowing with the milk of human music, spontaneous and prodigal in his play. Tausig the obverse of the medal; yet I believe that Liszt and Tausig were the piano Dioscuri, and not Liszt and Chopin. Chopin as a pianist has a niche all his own.

In an article several years ago and in the magazine section of _The Times_, I wrote that Leopold Godowsky is a pianist for pianists, as Shelley is a poet for poets. But everybody reads Shelley nowadays, and no doubt compares him unfavorably with the ear-splitting verse of the cacophonous young poets of the hour. Leopold Liebling took exception to my ascription, and I fancy he is right; every musical person listens to the alluring playing of Godowsky quite impervious to the fact that there are aspects of his art which will always escape them. In his playing he is transcendental. This doesn’t mean that he is frostily objective; he is human, emotional, and has at his finger ends all styles. It is the fine equilibrium of intellect and emotion that compels our admiration. No one plays Chopin like Godowsky, no, not even that tricky kobold, Vladimir de Pachmann. Paderewski is more emotional, Josef Hofmann extorts a richer, a more sonorous tone from the wires; nevertheless, Godowsky is a Chopinist in a class apart. He doesn’t drip honey in the nocturnes as does Ignace Jan, Premier of Poland; he can’t thunder the polonaises like his friend Jozio from Cracow; but these qualities he gives us in his own scale of tonal values. He is a powerful man with muscles that are both velvet and steel. When he wishes he, too, can sound the orchestral note; but, then, he seldom wishes this. His feeling for the limitations of the piano recalls the words of Rafael Joseffy: “I’m not a brass band”; Joseffy, who, in his abhorrence of a smeary touch produced his legato with the aid of the pedals, and what an aristocratic floating touch was his! What poetry! What atmosphere!

Setting aside his Chopin interpretations, which we take for granted, as he is Slavic, have you heard Godowsky play Mozart, or the neglected Haydn; or Schubert, Schumann? Of his Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms I shall not write. I can only repeat—all schools are at his beck, and if they are “perfect pictures, perfectly framed and hung,” as Joseffy said of his beloved master, Tausig, there is also the personal equation, for me, full of magic. Sensationalism, the pianistic fracas, posing for the gallery, all the bag of cheap tricks this great pianist eschews. He is master of the art of playing the piano beautifully. His exquisitely plastic phrasing, artistic massing of colors, above all the nobility of his conception—little wonder I call him a Brahma of the keyboard, far-fetched as the simile may sound. To Godowsky all other pianists could go to school, if for nothing else but the purity of his style, his kaleidoscopic tintings, his polyphony. And it must be admitted that pianists I have spoken to about him admit his power. He does not boast the grand manner of Josef Hofmann, yet Hofmann is reported to have told his manager that he enjoyed listening in a room to Godowsky more than playing to crowded and enthusiastic multitudes at his own concerts. Truly a fraternal and noble sentiment! If it comes to sheer sensationalism, then Godowsky easily leads them all, Rosenthal not excepted. I refer you to his paraphrases of Chopin, Weber, and Johann Strauss, and the supreme ease with which he conquers them. Brahma, indeed. Although as he plays he looks more like Buddha under his Bodh tree conjuring beautiful sounds from sky and air and the murmuring of crystalline waters.

It must be nearly twenty years ago, anyhow eighteen, that I entertained Vladimir de Pachmann in my Dream Barn on Madison Avenue at Seventy-sixth Street. The tenth floor, a room as big and as lofty as a cathedral. Alas! where are such old-fashioned apartments to-day? After eating a duck, a kotchka, cooked Polish fashion, and borsch, beet soup, with numerous Slavic side-dishes, preceded by the inevitable zakuska—those appetite-slaying bonnes bouches—De Pachmann fiercely demanded cognac. I was embarrassed. Not drinking spirits, I had inconsiderately forgotten the taste of others. De Pachmann, who is a child at heart, too often a naughty child, cried to heaven that I was a hell of a host! He said this in Russian, then in French, Italian, German, Polish, Spanish, English, and wound up with a hearty Hebrew “Raca!” which may mean hatred, or revenge, certainly something not endearing. But the worst was to come. There stood my big Steinway concert grand piano, and he circled about the instrument as if it were a dangerous monster. Finally he sniffed and snapped: “My contract does not permit me to play a Steinway.” I hadn’t thought of asking him, fearing Chopin’s classic retort after a dinner party at Paris: “Madame, j’ai mangé si peu!” Finally I saw the hole in the millstone and excused myself. When I returned with a bottle of abominable cognac the little man’s malicious smile changed to a look of ecstasy, and he was not a drinking man ever; but he was accustomed to his “petit verre” after dining, and was ill-tempered when deprived of it. Such is human nature, something that Puritans, prohibitionists, and other pernicious busybodies will never understand. And then this wizard lifted the fall-board of my piano and, quite forgetful of that “contract,” began playing. And how he did play! Ye gods! Bacchus, Apollo, and Venus and all other pleasant celestial persons, how you must have revelled when De Pachmann played! In the more intimate atmosphere of my apartment his music was of a gossamer web, iridescent, aerial, an æolian harp doubled by a diabolic subtlety. Albert Ross Parsons, one of the few living pupils of Tausig, in reply to my query, How did Joseffy compare with Tausig? answered: “Joseffy was like the multicolored mist that encircles a mighty mountain; but beautiful.” So Pachmann’s weaving enchantments seemed in comparison to Godowsky’s profounder playing.

And what did Vladimir, hero of double-notes, play? Nothing but Godowsky, then new to me. Liszt had been his god, but Godowsky was now his living deity. He had studied, mastered, and memorized all those transcendental variations on Chopin studies, the most significant variations since the Brahms, a Paganini scaling of the heights of Parnassus; and I heard for the first time the paraphrase of Weber’s Invitation to the Valse, a much more viable arrangement than Tausig’s; also thrice as difficult. However, technique, as sheer technique, does not enter into the musical zone of Godowsky. He has restored polyphony to its central position, thus bettering in that respect Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt. I have called attention elsewhere to Godowsky’s solo sonata, which evokes images of Chopin and Brahms and Liszt—only in the scherzo. Instead of exhuming such an “ungrateful,” unpianistic composition as Tschaikovsky’s Sonata in G, pianists of caliber might more profitably introduce the Godowsky work. He is too modest or else too indifferent to put it on his programme. It “lies” so well for the keyboard, yet there is no denying its difficulties, chiefly polyphonic; the patterns are intricate, though free from the clogging effects of the Brahms sonatas. De Pachmann delighted his two auditors from 10 P. M. to 3 A. M. It is safe to wager that the old Carrollton never heard such music-making before or since. When he left, happy over his triumph—I was actually flabbergasted by the new music—he whispered: “Hein! What you think! You think I can play this wonderful music? You are mistaken. Wait till you hear Leopold Godowsky play. We are all children, all woodchoppers, compared with him!” Curiously enough, the last is the identical phrase uttered by Anton Rubinstein in regard to Franz Liszt. Perhaps it was a quotation, but De Pachmann meant it. It was the sincerest sentiment I had heard from his often insincere lips. We were all three surprised to find a score of people camping out on the curved stairway and passages, the idealist, a colored lad who ran the elevator, having succumbed to sleep. This impromptu Godowsky recital by a marvellous pianist, for De Pachmann was a marvel in his time, must have made a grand hit with my neighbors. It did with me, and when Godowsky returned to New York—I had last heard him in the middle nineties of the previous century—I lost no time in hearing him play in his inimitable manner those same works. A pianist who can win the heartiest admiration of such contemporaries as De Pachmann and Joseffy and Josef Hofmann—I could adduce many other names—must be a unique artist. And that Godowsky is.

When he isn’t teaching or playing with orchestra or in recitals Mr. Godowsky spends his leisure in pedagogic work. There is a wide-spreading education scheme which has St. Louis as headquarters, the name of which I’ve forgotten, though the name doesn’t much matter, as musicians the country over know it. For this Mr. Godowsky is editing the classics and romantics of piano literature. He is also composing the most charming music imaginable for the earlier and middle grades of students; music that has genuine musical values, with technical. Imagination and instruction blended. Pegasus harnessed to the humbler draught horse. If you think of Schumann’s various albums for the young you may surmise the spirit of the Godowsky curriculum. I have been reading through his Miniatures for four-hands (Carl Fischer, New York), three suites, twelve numbers in all, in which the treble is for the pupil of extreme simplicity yet demanding attention to the melodic line, and amply developing the rhythmic sense. With their fanciful titles, tiny mood-pictures, these Miniatures are bound to attract all teachers of the instrument. Leopold Godowsky is a master pedagogue, as well as a master of masters among virtuosi. He belongs to the race of such giants as Paganini, Liszt, Tausig—and he is “different.”

CONTEMPORARY BRAN

Yesterday was housecleaning in my office, which I need hardly tell you is situated under my hat. The principal débris to be removed and dumped into the waste-paper basket were letters addressed to this department. Their number was appalling, the accumulation of weeks, as the music editor has little time for answering letters. A dozen concerts a day, opera almost every night, do not make for the life tranquil. Now, letters, anonymous or signed, are always interesting, especially those in the first category. Praise and blame run neck and neck; cinquante-cinquante, in classic parlance. Occasionally abusive missives arrive, breathing fire and fury, and these are of psychologic import. You ask yourself why? And lose yourself in an interesting labyrinth of speculation. The small boy who chalks naughty words or figures on wall spaces during the spring of the year testifies to the rising sap of the budding season; it is an outlet for his nascent emotions. Presumably this is the case with those whose handwriting reveals their uneasy sex. But why do they select the present incumbent of this chair of criticism? William James, when he dissected Dr. Nordau, twenty-five years ago, pointed out as a major symptom of the too critical Max what is called by psychiatrists coprolalia, or a tendency to indulge in vulgar, abusive language. When certain inhibitions of polite society are removed the patient indulges in vile speech, and writes nasty and usually anonymous letters for reasons only known to himself or herself. Writers of anonymous letters are described as cowardly, but this is only half the truth; they are also sick-brained, suffering from mild hysteria, and as soon as they transfer to paper the expression of their petty spite are temporarily relieved; there is “a load off their minds,” as they put it.

This doesn’t mean that all anonymous letters are abusive; some of them are pleasant reading. A blushing maiden records her admiration. A “violinist” tells me that I have overpraised Raoul Vidas, although I was not at the concert in question, Sunday being my day of respite from the boiler shop; now and again pertinent criticism is received, but, whether signed or unsigned, all these communications only prove that their recipient’s casual writing is closely read, and that is a minor consolation. Then there are the letters asking for advice, and these contain harder nuts to crack. Why warn a young man or woman that musical criticism as a profession is a delusion and a snare? Neither one will believe you. Why suggest to an ambitious young composer that any other avocation will bring him, if not happiness, then, at least, bread and butter? But the stone hankers after the star, and who shall mock its aspiration? How often have we felt like crying aloud: “Hats on, gentleman, this is not a genius!” reversing the historic utterance of Robert Schumann. A critic should be clairvoyant, but sometimes he is not. And little wonder. Paste passes for diamonds, skim-milk masquerades as cream. But it is always well to face the rising, not the setting sun. Write only for young; the old will not heed you, being weary of the pother of life and art. To the young belongs the future. Hurrah for Ornstein and Prokofieff, or the ideals they represent! Progress always traverses a circle, it is more imaginary than real, but we must have the illusion of progress, else spiritually decay. Without vision people perish. Nice copybook axioms, paste them in your bonnet.