Charles Lamoureux
Plenty of strings is the only remedy for a bad balance which careful playing will not correct, and a plenty of strings is to be found only in large concert orchestras. Even in opera-houses the strings are often too few, while in theatres they nearly always are. The average theatrical manager knows very little about music and cares less. A business manager who knew something of the tone art was once engaged by a manager who controlled a travelling exhibition of “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” with all Mendelssohn’s music. He thought his exhibition worthy of the attention of the metropolis, but the business manager said to him:
“If we go into New York, we’ll have to increase the orchestra.”
“What for?” replied the manager. “We have all sorts of instruments now, haven’t we?”
“But we ought to have more first violins.”
“What! more than two?”
But, after all, the theatre is hardly the place to look for art in music. The concert-hall and the opera-house are its homes, but owing to the conditions which surround the performance of opera in most places, only the concert orchestra can be expected to show the highest possibilities of performance. In such an orchestra we may expect to find a proper distribution of instruments, and having that, we should demand a perfect solidity and balance of tone. I can hardly put too much emphasis on the necessity of good tone. Although the mere quality of sound belongs to the lowest department of musical excellence, the sensuous, it is nevertheless an instrument of the greatest power in the presentation of musical thought. There is something vital in a noble tone, something enthralling and inspiring. One recognizes it immediately when it is the voice of a distinguished singer, and I have seen audiences moved to amazing enthusiasm by a glorious voice which had neither dramatic intelligence nor vocal cunning to aid the potent spell of its pure quality. An orchestra should be a mighty singer in every sense, and it must have the first requisite of one—a fine voice. There should be nothing cheap or vulgar in its tone. It should be one grand flow of gorgeous, all-surrounding sound, smooth, sweet, mellow, and pure, whether heard in the aërial whisper of the last bars of the “Lohengrin” prelude or the thunderous peal of the “Kaisermarsch.”
Tone being assured, the next traits of vital importance in orchestral performance are precision and unanimity. Precision is a feature of attack, while unanimity refers to those parts of a passage not included in the attack. Both are dependent upon the elementary business of keeping together. If the players of an orchestra are not at all times absolutely at one in their work, there can be neither precision nor unanimity. Precision is keeping absolutely together in beginning and finishing, whether it be a detached chord or tone, or a phrase. Unanimity is keeping together, in time and force and all other requirements, between the beginning and the end. The act of commencing a tone is called the attack. This should be so precise that the tone seems to be produced by a single instrument, not by a number. If it is a detached tone, or a phrase like that at the beginning of Beethoven’s C minor symphony, every instrument engaged in its utterance should cease to sound at exactly the same instant. Precision is a matter in which many auditors are deceived. I well remember how I gaped in wonder in my boyish days when I heard an orchestra under Theodore Thomas play a series of staccato chords with such precision that they came out like the cracks of a whip. I have since learned that this is one of the easiest feats of an orchestra. It is a far greater test of precision to play with absolute sharpness and clearness of cut a passage such as this from the Ninth Symphony:
Furthermore, precision is just as necessary to the correct performance of flowing cantabile passages as it is to those of vigorous declamatory style. It belongs to the general department of accuracy, and without accuracy in such features as the duration of sounds, no orchestral playing can have color, force, or finish.
Unanimity, as I have said, means keeping together in matters other than the beginning and ending of a tone or phrase. Attention has been called to the fact that if the notes of a melody and its harmonies are not played in exactly the same time by all the instruments engaged in their performance, the quality of tone is seriously impaired; but it must now be added that further injury comes in the shape of destruction of the outlines of the rhythm. This is such an important factor in all music that to decrease its clearness is like blurring the outlines of a drawing. When the rhythm of an orchestral composition or the outlines in a painting are destroyed, there remains nothing but a blurred color-scheme. A color-scheme is often very pretty, but it is no more a composition than the view in a kaleidoscope is a landscape.
Unanimity, furthermore, includes something beyond mere clearness of enunciation. It embraces also accent. In such a phrase as that quoted above from the Ninth Symphony, there are a series of natural accentuations, and it is essential to a brilliant and stirring utterance of the phrase that every instrument in the orchestra should put the accents in the same places and give them the same amount of force. In passages which are not written for the whole orchestra there should be unanimity in accent among those for which they are written. In fact, an orchestra should have absolutely military accuracy in all its work, and this presupposes long and arduous drill and extended association. Permanency is a necessity to fine orchestral work. Men who have played together a long time, even under an inferior conductor, will play with much more precision and unanimity than men newly brought together under the beat of a famous director. The highest results are attainable only with a permanent orchestra under a competent conductor.
But with all this precision and unanimity the playing of an orchestra should be flexible. As I have said in another volume, “The music should never sound rigid, but should seem to come in a sinuous stream of purling sound.” The average concert-goer would probably describe the playing of an orchestra deficient in flexibility as “stiff,” and that is a very expressive way of putting it. It will be remembered that in “H. M. S. Pinafore” the only person who was invariably right was Dick Deadeye, but everyone applauded Buttercup’s assertion that he was “a little triangular.” An orchestra must always be correct, but it need not be triangular. Inflexibility is usually the result of bad conducting.
A martinet, with phlegmatic temperament, can make an orchestra play as inflexibly as a street piano. A conductor of excessively melting temperament will often melt his orchestra so that its playing will be as sweet, as flexible, and as limp as hot taffy.
And this brings us to the all-important question of light and shade. The fundamental element of light and shade is the distribution of force and speed. An orchestra is capable of a pianissimo, which is like the softest whisper of a summer evening’s breeze, and of a fortissimo, which is like the booming of a thunder-storm. There is an infinitesimal scale of gradations between these two extremes, and these should all be properly employed. Of course, their use is guided by the conductor, but they form a part of the technics of orchestral playing, and hence must be described here. All lovers of music know what effects are brought about by skilful use of alterations of tempo—the accelerando and ritardando—and by the combination of these with gradations of force. In the application of these devices an orchestra should be adept. The placing of the effects is, of course, indicated in the score, or, if not, must be the result of the judgment and taste of the conductor; but the manner of producing them is the work of the performers. It requires frequent rehearsal to get these effects made with precision, unanimity, and smoothness of tone, yet they should be so made. An orchestra should sing like a great singer, and it should be able to produce all the delicate shades of song as a human voice can.
But an orchestra has many voices, and the composer often takes advantage of this fact. He frequently calls upon his instrument to sing several melodies simultaneously, or, as in the case of a fugal work, different parts of the same melody at the same time. This kind of writing calls for a distinct delivery of the middle voices. Even in compositions which are not polyphonic, there are often subsidiary melodic fragments in parts other than those which are playing the principal theme. These fragments should be heard; composers do not write them by accident. They should blossom out spontaneously as exuberant exfoliations of the harmonic garden. They should not be thrust obstreperously in the faces of the auditors, but they should not be permitted to escape notice. The middle voices are sadly neglected at times. Some conductors seem to confine their whole study of a score to hunting for the principal theme and bringing that out, while the delicious bits of counterpoint, which the composer has been at no small pains to devise, are left to take care of themselves. Such conductors remind me of a professional musician who was engaged in a discussion of Richard Wagner in the corridor of the Metropolitan Opera House, while inside the orchestra was playing the vorspiel to “Die Meistersinger.”
“It is a pity,” said this wise man, in a condescending manner; “but Wagner knew absolutely nothing about counterpoint.”
And at that very instant the orchestra was singing five different melodies at once; and, as Anton Seidl was the conductor, they were all audible.
Light and shade, as we roughly call them—the German “nuancirung” (nuancing) is far better—depend also on phrasing. In singing, phrasing means the division of the melody into groups of notes, so that breath can be taken. Now, phrasing is obviously quite as vital to wind-instrument players as to singers, because the former, too, must have intervals to take breath. Obviously, if the several players stop to take breath, they should cease to sound their instruments at the same instant, and begin again with equal precision. A similar grouping of notes is made in the performance of bowed instruments by the movements of the bow. All violin-players know that there is a difference in the results produced by the up-stroke and those by the down-stroke. Phrasing in the orchestra, then, is the technical treatment of the natural groups of tones which form the component parts of a melody in such a way that they shall come out clearly and symmetrically and in a vocal style. Here again we come upon the technical part of a conductor’s work. It is he who regulates the phrasing. The distribution of up and down strokes of the bow is in a general way left to the concert-master, the leader of the first violins, but he is, of course, subject to the direction of the conductor. Many composers of the present day mark the bowing in particular passages, but most of them content themselves with indicating such things as slurred notes and staccati, or special effects, such as playing near the bridge, or with the point of the bow. The legato of stringed instruments is indicated in a score by a curved line drawn over or under the passages, thus:
Detached notes are indicated by dots, while lightly detached ones, to be played with a single stroke, are indicated by dots with a slur, or legato mark, over them, thus:
All these details of bowing and of breathing in the wind-instrument choir should be carefully regulated. They are elementary parts of the technic of orchestral performance, and they contribute to the production of smoothness, elegance, and refinement in the playing of a band, as well as to force, brilliancy, and expression. Furthermore, all demands of the composer in regard to the use of particular instruments or the uncommon treatment of instruments should be respected. If the result is bad, it is the composer’s fault. But it is usually good. When Hans Sachs, in “Die Meistersinger,” makes David a journeyman cobbler, he smacks the boy’s ear with his broad hand, and Wagner imitates the ringing in the offended member by the whizzing note of a stopped horn. To play that note unstopped would be to defeat the composer’s intention. It would be equally wrong to neglect to put mutes on where directed to do so. Sometimes composers call for very curious performances, but their wishes should be respected as far as possible. For instance, in his “Lelio, ou le retour à la vie,” Berlioz has written a passage for clarinet “con sordino,” and has directed that the instrument should be muted by being “wrapped in a bag of cloth or leather.” His desire was to give the clarinet a veiled and distant sound, and his wishes should be carried out. In another place Berlioz calls for tympani drum-sticks with heads of sponge. Wagner calls for tenor tubas in the funeral march of “Die Götterdämmerung,” and Mozart calls for a mandolin to accompany Don Giovanni’s “Deh vieni.” Such requirements should always be fulfilled, and so should all directions as to the manner of performance.
We are in the habit of thinking that what may be called the virtuoso orchestra is a product of our own time, but perhaps we flatter ourselves. It is very certain that the orchestra of the Paris Conservatoire played with splendid precision and with much fire half a century ago, and there are other orchestras in Europe which have to live up to some pretty old traditions. It was only last September (1898) that the Dresden Court Orchestra celebrated its three hundred and fiftieth anniversary. To be sure, when it was established by the Elector Maurice it was a singing choir, whose members learned to play instruments in order to supply accompaniments; but it developed into an orchestra, and as such it helped to produce Heinrich Schütz’s “Seven Last Words of Christ,” and his “Daphne,” which was the first German opera. The Esterhazy orchestra, under Haydn, was no mean band, and the famous Mannheim orchestra, under Stamitz, revealed possibilities of performance which did much toward forming Mozart’s symphonic style. The Leipsic Gewandhaus orchestra dates back to 1743, when it numbered sixteen players and gave its concerts in a private house. These concerts were interrupted by the Seven Years’ War, but were resumed in 1763 with an orchestra of thirty. The first concert in the new Gewandhaus rooms took place on September 29, 1781. Since that time the seasons have been regular. Mendelssohn was the conductor from 1835 to 1843, and Neils W. Gade from 1844 to 1848. The development of style and technic in the performances of this orchestra had very considerable influence on the advance of orchestral playing throughout Europe. Other notable German organizations are the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and the orchestra of the opera at Munich. The Vienna Philharmonic is celebrated for its strings.
In France the progress of orchestral playing received its first impetus from the labors of François Joseph Gossec (1733-1829), whose extraordinarily long and active life enabled him to see not only the blossom, but some of the early fruit of his efforts. He was the first French composer of symphonies, and in 1770 founded the “Concert des Amateurs.” He did much toward developing good orchestral playing in Paris, and prepared the way for the famous François Antoine Habeneck (1781-1849), who, in 1828, founded the “Société des Concerts du Conservatoire.”
Orchestral playing has never reached a high plane in England, but the London Philharmonic Society has an important history because of the famous works written for it, among them symphonies and overtures by Cherubini, Spohr’s second symphony, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and Mendelssohn’s Italian symphony. In America orchestral performances have always been popular since the foundation of the New York Philharmonic Society in 1842. The labors of such admirable conductors as Theodore Eisfeld, Carl Bergmann, and, most of all, Theodore Thomas, did much to develop a high degree of skill among orchestral performers and a wide appreciation on the part of the public. The debt of the country to Mr. Thomas is one that it will carry to the end of its musical development. The foundation of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, in 1880, by Colonel Henry L. Higginson, of Boston, gave the United States its first concert orchestra established on a permanent basis, and the organization has come to be regarded as one of the leading orchestras of the world. The Chicago Orchestra, directed by Theodore Thomas, is its only rival in America.
Nothing more excellently pictures the conditions under which an orchestra comes to the perfection of its work than a few words in one of Schumann’s comments on music in Leipsic: “Before we take leave of the Gewandhaus concerts for half a year,” he says, “we must award a crown of merit to the forty or fifty orchestral members. We have no solo-players like Brod in Paris or Harper in London; but even these cities can scarcely boast such fine, united playing. And this results from the nature of circumstances. Our musicians here form a family; they see each other and practise together daily; they are always the same, so that they are able to play a Beethoven symphony without notes. Add to these a concert-master who can conduct such scores from memory, a director who knows them by, and reveres them at, heart, and the crown is complete.”