III
“It is a mistake of much popular criticism,” says Walter Pater, in the first two sentences of his essay on “The School of Giorgione,” “to regard poetry, music, and painting—all the various products of art—as but translations into different languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought, supplemented by certain technical qualities of colour, in painting; of sound, in music; of rhythmical words, in poetry. In this way, the sensuous element in art, and with it almost everything in art that is essentially artistic, is made a matter of indifference; and a clear apprehension of the opposite principle—that the sensuous material of each art brings with it a special phase or quality of beauty, untranslatable into the forms of any other, an order of impressions distinct in kind—is the beginning of all true æsthetic criticism.”
Strawinsky, in a sense, is quite done with programme music; at least he says that this is so. “La musique est trop bête pour exprimer autre chose que la musique” is his pregnant phrase, which I cannot quote often enough. And in an interview with Stanley Wise, which appeared in the columns of the “New York Tribune” he further says, “Programme music... has been obviously discontinued as being distinctly an uncouth form which already has had its day; but music, nevertheless, still drags out its life in accordance with these false notions and conceptions. Without absolutely defying the programme, musicians still draw upon sources foreign to their art.... The true inwardness of music being purely acoustic, the art so expresses itself without being concerned with feelings alien to its nature.... Music in the theatre is still held in bondage to other elements. Wagner, in particular, is responsible for this servitude in which music labours to-day.”
The greater part of Igor Strawinsky’s music, up to date, is written to a programme, but these remarks of the composer should not be incomprehensible on that account. Somewhat later than the performance of the three pieces for string quartet, The Firebird and Petrouchka were performed in New York and were hailed by the critics, en masse, as most delightful works. But the music depends for its success, they said, on the stage action to explain it. I fancy this is true of many operas which were written for the stage. Siegfried, as a whole, would be pretty tiresome in concert form and so would La Fille du Regiment. And read what Henry Fothergill Chorley has to say about the works of Gluck (“Modern German Music”): “The most experienced and imaginative of readers will derive from the closest perusal of the scores of Gluck’s operas, feeble and distant impressions of their power and beauty. The delicious charm of Mozart’s melody—the expressive nobility of Handel’s ideas—may in some measure be comprehended by the student at the pianoforte and the eye may assure the reader how masterly is the symmetry of the vocal score with one,—how rich and complete is the management of the instrumental score, with the other master. But this is in no respect the case with Alceste, the two Iphigénies and Armide—it may be added, with almost any opera written according to the canons of French taste. That which appears thin, bald, severe, when it is merely perused, is filled up, brightens, enchants, excites, and satisfies, when it is heard with action,—to a degree only to be believed upon experience. Out of the theatre, three-fourths of Gluck’s individual merit is lost. He wrote for the stage.” That all this is true any one who, like me, has taken the trouble to study the scores of the Gluck operas, which are infrequently performed, may have discovered for himself. I have never heard Alceste and that lyric drama, as a result, has never sprung to me from the printed page as do the notes of Orphée, Armide, and Iphigénie en Tauride. I am convinced of the depth of expression contained in its pages; I am certain of its noble power, but only because I have had a similar experience with other Gluck music dramas, with which I have later become acquainted in the theatre.
This theory in regard to Petrouchka and The Firebird may be easily contradicted, however. One listener told me that she got the complete picture of the Russian fair by closing her eyes; it was all in the music. The action, as a matter of fact, she added, annoyed her. It is quite certain that the music of either of these works is delightful when played on the piano; an average roomful of people who like to listen to music will be charmed with it. The Sacrifice to the Spring was hissed intolerantly when it was performed as a ballet in Paris but, later (April 5, 1914), when Pierre Monteux gave an orchestral performance of the work at a concert it was applauded as violently.
Strawinsky has, it is true, worked away from representation (in the sense of copying nature or, like Wagner, relying on literary formulas for his effects) in his music, but he has written very little that does not depend on a programme, either expressed or implied. All songs of course are “explained” by their lyrics. The Scherzo Fantastique and Fireworks are programme music in the lighter sense, and naturally the music of his ballets and his opera depends for its meaning on the stage action. What Strawinsky means to do, I think—certainly what he has done—is to avoid going outside his subject or requiring his listener to do so. To understand the music of his opera you need never have heard a real nightingale sing, for the bird does not sing at all like a nightingale, a fact which was not understood by the critics when the work was first produced, and in The Sacrifice to the Spring you will find no attempt made to ape natural sounds, although there was ample opportunity for doing so.... Another modern worker in tone, Leo Ornstein, in the accompaniment to his cradle song (it is the same wiegenlied set by Richard Strauss, by the way) tries to give his hearers the mother’s overtones, her thoughts about the child’s future, etc.; the music, instead of attempting to express the exact meaning of the poem, expresses more than the poem.
And Mr. Ornstein once said to me, “What I try to do in composing is to get underneath, to express the feeling underneath—not to be photographic. I do not think it is art to reproduce a steam whistle but it is art to give the feeling that the steam whistle gives us. That can never be done by exact reproduction.... I should not like a steam whistle introduced into the concert room” (I had shamelessly suggested it) “... but great, smashing chords....”
Yet Mr. Ornstein in his Impressions of the Thames is as near actual representation as Whistler or Monet... certainly a musical impressionist.
Is anything true? I hope not. At dinner the other evening a lady attempted to prove to me that there were standards by which beauty could be judged and rules by which it could be constructed. She was unsuccessful.