Music

IT is becoming more and more plainly evident that onr best musical institutions are beginning fully to appreciate the principle of æsthetic education. The Harvard Musical Association have from the very first made this their fundamental principle of action. The Handel and Haydn Society have shown in their last triennial festival that they are more than ever persuaded of its importance. In glancing back upon this festival, the earnest music-lover must consider it an event wholly without parallel in the history of music in this country. We can look through programme after programme of similar festivals in England without finding ourselves in so evenly pure an æsthetic atmosphere. In all tho six days of the festival there were performed at the very most but two or three pieces unworthy of a place on such an occasion. With the exception of Cherubini, all tho really great names in modern music were represented. As usual the place of honor was given to Mendelssohn. Counting the extra performance of Elijah, Mendelssohn’s name appeared seven times on the programme. Next in order came Each and Beethoven, who appeared four times each.

The extraordinary popularity of Mendelssohn in England and America is by no means difficult to account for. Mendelssohn unites in himself almost all the elements which are to be admired in other composers. A most clear, transparent style; great melodic power; a perfection of form that is unexcelled by any other composer; rich and effective orchestration; dramatic power, or at the least, great dramatic ingenuity, are all to be found in his music. He is, moreover, almost constantly artistically as well as morally refined. Mendelssohn is eminently the gentleman-composer; he never struggles after an effect, he is never obtrusively self-conscious; he sometimes rises to a great height of formal beauty, sometimes, though much more rarely, to great beauty of sentiment; he never shocks you by inelegance or vulgarity; he is always eminently respectable; but the Staubbach is not further from Niagara than he is from genuine greatness.

Of all the things of Mendelssohn that were given at the. festival, the most

thoroughly beautiful, to our thinking, is the soprano solo and chorus, “Oh for the wings of a dove,” in the motette, " Hear my prayer.” Here, if anywhere, Mendelssohn has succeeded in uniting religious sentiment to exquisite formal beauty. A certain refined, poetic atmosphere pervades the whole, without in the least obscuring the purely devotional spirit, as is too often the case with Mendelssohn. The solo and chorus, “ The enemy shoutoth,” in the same work, is dramatically effective, at best. The few numbers from the posthumous oratorio, Christus, were certainly interesting, as what unfinished, posthumous work of a man of Mendelssohn’s prestige is not ? In some of them great beauties lie even on the surface. The chorus, “ There shall a star from Jacob come forth,” can he compared with anything the composer has written, as far as mere beauty of form goes. It is in the composer’s most lyricmelodious vein; it were difficult to imagine anything more enchanting than the graceful rise and fall of the voices in the first twenty-eight bars; had it been a Mahomet’s promise of eternal hasheesh and narghilés, it could not have been more fascinating. Only at the words, “ And dash in pieces princes and nations,” does the composer’s hand become paralytic in its attempt at strength. From this point it gets weaker and weaker, until in the choral, “ As bright the star of morning gleams,” it becomes little better than mere churchchoir psalmody. What this choral harmony might have seemed, had not Sebastian Bach done the same thing in so incomparably stronger a way, we cannot tell; but the comparison with Bach which it forces upon the mind makes it appear almost unbearably feeble. In the short turbm, or people’s choruses, the composer has evidently made every attempt at dramatic effect. These choruses are to a certain extent brilliant. The restless twelve-eighths measure of “ He stirreth up the Jews ” has at least a disquieting effect, rather of the nervous involuntary sort, and the “ Crucify him” (notwithstanding a bad false quantity, which exists in German as well as in English) is in its opening phrase peculiarly effective. Here Mendelssohn, who never for a moment forgot that he was above all things a musician, has given us a bit of drastic realism that has rather a tendency to disarm criticism, if only from the fact that it does not fly in the face of any principle of formal art; “ We have a sacred law ” comes out in a bold, trumpet-like phrase, which rather disappoints one in not sounding .as effectively as it looks on paper, with the traditional diminished seventh chord on “ Let him suffer.”

But after all, these choruses, in spite of their dramatic truthfulness, are somehow wanting in just that indescribable, intangible element which we call strength, power, or grandeur. Mendelssohn has put into all his people’s choruses a certain brassbound, heartless, pagan element that is unpleasant rather than impressive. We feel this in all the Christas turbæ, in the Baal choruses iu Elijah, eveu in the “ Oh be gracious ” in Saint Paul, which has one knows not what uncanny, barbaric tang of Mumbo Jumbo worship to it. Whether this character he the result of an instinctive tendency or of the most perfectly concealed art, it is always technically justifiable on naturalistic dramatic grounds, but it is nevertheless repulsive rather than impressive, muscular rather than powerful.

The exceedingly defective condition in which Bach, like Händel, left his scores, acted for a long while as an insuperable obstacle to any satisfactory performance. Even as far back as Mozart’s time this difficulty was felt to he a serious one. Mozart rescored nearly the whole of Handel’s Messiah (not always in the best style). Mendelssohn wrote out a complete organ part, for Israel in Egypt, and wholly rescored Acis and Galatea in a manner which smacked much more of Mendelssohn than of Händel. It was long before anything of the. kind was done with Bach. At last Robert Eranz filled out the scores of the Saint Matthew Passion-music, the Magnificat in D, and some other of Bach’s works, as well as Handel’s L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato. The manner in which Franz has done his work is so superb as to leave all previous attempts far behind. The question as to whether such restoring of old works is artistically justifiable or not, has been the subject of much discussion and counter-discussion of late, but it is one which we cannot enter on here.

The rescoring of works like the Passion must be looked at from a distinct point of view. As far as the purely contrapuntal part of the work is concerned, there can hardly be two opinions about Franz’s score. It is simply above praise, from its musical perfection and its complete adherence to Bach’s style. This part of the work of completing the original score has nothing whatever in common with what is technically called rescoring, that is, changing or adding to the mere instrumentation. It has to do with the anatomical structure of the composition itself. As for Franz’s orchestration, it is really superb, as such. It is, moreover, perfectly in harmony with the spirit of the work as we now conceive it. Franz has indubitably given many portions of the work a modern richness of coloring which is different from any orchestral effect that has come down to us from Bach’s time. Whether this is excusable or not may be the subject of much discussion. To us it is not only excusable but admirable. The whole orchestra of Bach’s day was something wholly and vitally different from that of our own time. Since then some instruments have wholly fallen into disuse; others have been introduced. The old orchestral coloring has been irredaimably lost. It is no disrespect to old scores to substitute the modern richer hues for the old ones, whenever it can he done without running counter to the intrinsic spirit of the work. Wherever Bach has aimed at orchestral effects as such, Franz has left them as they stood. He has changed nothing in the score, but has only added what was wanting. The performance of the Passionmusic was in many respects a positive triumph. The great shortcoming was necessarily in the airs. We must be content to wait some years before, our singers begin to feel themselves really at home in this music. It is by no means music that can be sung to a metronome, and the great rhythmical complexity of the orchestral part makes a satisfying delivery of the airs often very difficult. But the choruses went well beyond all expectation ; even (barring some few wavering bars) the extremely difficult opening chorus. An interesting question arises in regard to the tempi of the various solos and choruses, as taken by M r. Zerrahn. We give for comparison the tempi of a few choruses and solos as taken at the performance of the Passion in Berlin by the Singacademie under the leadership of Grell, in 1870, at the St. Thomas church in Leipzig, on Good Friday, 1870, at the recent performance by the Händel and Haydn Society, and the metronome marks in Franz’s score.

Some of Franz’s marks we hare reduced to the same denomination as the other columns. Thus in the opening chorus Franz’s mark =76 would furnish no direct comparison to the eve with Groll’s = — 112, so we have put it = 228. The marks in the first three columns were taken by competent musicians at the several performances, with the second hand of a watch. It will be seen at a glance that Franz’s tempi are much faster than the others. In the first chorus, indeed, he is more than twice as fast as Grell. Zerrahn is markedly faster than either Grell or Rietz, but by no means so fast as Franz. This enormous discrepancy may be accounted for in two ways. In the first place, Franz probably used a metronome. As metronomes are made, the chances are very much in favor of its being a had one, that is, one which when set at 60 did not strike once per second. In the second place, Franz has been of late years seriously deaf, so that he probably wrote down his metronome marks with the score in one hand and the metronome in the other, humming over the themes to himself. The great difficulty of judging of a tempo while not actually hearing a piece, may be appreciated by any one who will take the trouble to try it. We would not then set too high a value upon Franz’s metronome marks. Even Zerrahn’s tempi often sounded to us unreasonably fast, especially in the tenor air, No. 25. Imagine the grand first chorus rushing along at the pace Franz has indicated ! The effect would, no doubt, be one of immense power, but would not the chorus express ungovernable tragic fury rather than sorrowing lamentation ? Would it not be more a passionate cry for vengeance than a tearful invitation to fellowship in grief and mourning ? This wonderful chorus seems to exhaust all possible tragic expression.

It is to be regretted by all who are anxious to interest the musical public at large iu the Passion-music and in Bach’s choral works generally, that the selections made by the Händel and Haydn Society were almost wholly in the same strain. There is no lack of variety and contrasts in the work, in spite of the vein of deep tragedy that necessarily runs through it. The only numbers that represented the more brilliant, dramatic side of the work were the duet, “ Alas ! my Jesus now is taken,” with the double chorus, “ Ye lightnings, ye thunders!” in the first part, and the recitative about the rending of the veil in the temple, in the second part.

We would have gladly heard more of these dramatic numbers, more of the stormy turbie. The scene before Pontius Pilate and the whole scene of the crucifixion were unaccountably omitted. We think that for a first venture, it would have been more judicious to have given as much as possible of this highly dramatic sort, and also to have given more of the simple chorals which are to be easily enjoyed by any audience, than to have given almost exclusively the merely contemplative part of the work, especially the long and taxing arias, for which neither our audience nor our singers aro as yet quite ripe. It is unfortunate that Bach, of all composers, should have been first introduced to our public by his least seductive side; at all events, that phase of his genius has always been presented first which was the least calculated to enlist the sympathies of our musical public. In his instrumental music, we first became acquainted with his great organ fugues and toccatas, and the first things we heard of his vocal compositions were the airs in the Passion. These airs are a running commentary upon the dramatic action in the work, for we must insist that the basis of the work is essentially dramatic. Divorced from their surroundings, these airs can only appeal to the public through their purely musical beauty, which is indeed of the very highest grade, but, unfortunately, of such a character as not to be generally felt, excepting after thorough acquaintance. We cannot but think that these very airs, taken in connection with what logically precedes and follows them, would he much more quickly appreciated than is otherwise possible. To make this more plain, we will take an example. At the Händel and Haydn Society’s performance, the choral No. 53, “ Commit thy ways, O pilgrim,” was immediately followed by the long soprano recitative and air, " He hath done only good to all,” and that by the choral, “ O head all bruised and wounded.” The whole dramatic action which gives rise to and accounts for these numbers was omitted. This omission was furthermore unfortunate as it brought three slow, solemn movements into immediate contact with each other. In the original text the choral, “ Commit thy ways ” is followed by the alternately descriptive and dramatic recitative containing Pilate’s appeal to the people, which reaches its climax at the phrase, “ Whether of the twain will ye that I release unto you ? ” upon which the chorus thunders out “ Barabbas ! ” in the most blood-curdling diminished seventh chord that we know of in all music. Then follows Pilate’s question, “ What shall I do then with Jesus which is called Christ?” Upon which the chorus again answers with the prolonged shriek, growing in fearful intensity as it goes on, of “ Let him be crucified ! ” The dramatic interest has here been worked up to an almost unbearable pitch of intensity. Now Bach steps in with the Commentary in the calm, grandly tragic choral, “ How wonderful is this punishment ! ” Then comes a short return to dramatic action in Pilate’s question, “ Why, what evil hath he done ? ” when the soprano voice answers in sad recitative, half in reply, half in commentary: “He hath done only good to all. The blind have back their sight through him; the lame again are walking .... beside my Jesu nought hath done,” followed by the air, “From love unbounded, yes, all from love, my Saviour dieth.” Then the dramatic thread is taken up again, add the chorus reiterates its clamorous demand, “ Let him be crucified ! ” The choral, “ 0 head all bruised and wounded,” comes in somewhat later, immediately after the sneering chorus, “ Hail, King of the Jews ! ” and the evangelist’s recitative, “ And they spit upon him, and took the reed, and smote him on the head.” No doubt the intrinsic musical beauty of these long, sad airs is really a thousand times more important than their dramatic relation to the rest of the work. But whan we insist upon is that nine persons out of ten will he first drawn towards them by their intimate connection with their dramatic surroundings, rather than by their musical merit per se; and that if the public can by any means be brought to like them, we must not look too closely into the mental operation by which such liking is brought about.

But after all, and in spite of the rather general want of appreciation of the airs, the performance of the Passion was so flattering a success that one can really find but little fault. The thunder and lightning chorus created as much enthusiasm as anything that has ever been sung in the music hall, and, although it was the closing chorus of a part, it had to be repeated. We hope that this great work, having now been formally introduced to our public, will not be allowed to lie upon the shelf in future.

Accounting the production of the Passion as the most important feature of the festival, the next most important was certainly the production of two choral works by American composers, namely, John K. Paine’s Saint Peter, and Dudley Buck’s Porty-sixth Psalm. In Mr. Buck’s composition we have a work that at once commands our respect from its excellence of form and purity of style. It begins with a short, sonorous orchestral introduction, which in the very opening bars betrays the composer’s fondness for those rich,sensuous chords of the seventh with the major third that we find so constantly in all his writings. This introduces a beautifully written and exceedingly melodious chorus in F to the first three verses of the psalm. If this chorus is in some places of not quite Titanic strength, it is certainly not wanting in great beauty of form, and in some places it is extremely brilliant. If it have a fault, it is that it is often rather too sweet; the harmonies have at times a somewhat too caressing grace. The fourth and fifth verses of the psalm are set as a soprano solo and double quartette. The number is melodious and well-written, and both voices and instruments are well and effectively used, but the style is rather light for the subject, and the music too often merely pleasing, at times almost trivial. The third number, a recitation for bass voices, is one of the strongest in the work. It comprises the sixth verse of the psalm, and leads directly to number four, the theme of which is first given out by the bass voice and then taken up by the chorus. This chorus, comprising the seventh verse, is the most brilliant piece of writing in the work. The theme, albeit somewhat common-place, has much dash and brilliancy in it, and is most effectively worked up, with an occasional tendency, to be sure, as we have said of the opening chorus, to the redundantly sensuous ; for instance in the long pedal on the dominant beginning at the bottom of page 38, and the ensuing modulation as far as the first bar on page 41, the purely religious element runs great risk of being lulled to sleep, while the ear is pillowed on such downy harmonies.

The next number, a tenor solo on the words of the eighth and ninth verses, is extremely beautiful: the lovely, finely articulated melody showing not only great sensibility to formal beauty (of which there is no lack throughout the work), but even great refinement and some depth of feeling. The middle allegro in A minor is full of strength and dramatic fire, and all its effects are simply and easily brought about. The return to the first andante in A major is well managed. The last two bars of the air, however, do not satisfy us, neither can we quite understand them. There seems to be a bar wanting. Number six, comprising the tenth verse, is a well-written quartette.

The final chorus, after a few full chords, strikes in with the theme of number four, which is briefly worked up in fugue form, soon followed by a more elaborate fugue on a new subject, but the original theme returns again with a long pedal on the dominant, and is worked up to the end with a constant acceleration of tempo. The end is not quite worthy of the rest of the work, being rather wanting in dignity, and not particularly effective.

The work, as a whole, has many great beauties to offset its not unfrequent weaknesses, and is certainly a composition that Americans have every reason to be proud of. It moreover, by its very merits, invites honest and searching criticism. To treat it with gloved hands, would he to at once place it in that dubious class of first attempts, to which it in no way belongs. Mr. Buck has earned the right to be treated fairly and on a level, without being shielded behind considerations of nationality or inexperience. He has well won his position as a composer, and now and henceforth his works, and his works alone, must be his weapons of defense in it.

It would be difficult to find in the whole range of sacred choral music two works more totally dissimilar at every point than Dudley Buck’s Forty-sixth Psalm and John K. Paine’s Saint Peter. Such being the case, we shall make no comparison whatever between the two works. If Mr. Paine have a distinguishing quality as a composer it is that of strength. When his Mass in D, a work of considerable power and great formal beauty, was published in 1866, his command over musical form was at once evident. But his studies of other composers were then too recent to allow of his habitual musical thoughts running in any very original track. Since then, what might be called the intellectual side ofhis genius has developed itself with astounding rapidity. One cannot look through his compositions that are spread over the last 'five or six years, without being struck by the ever increasing, at times really startling, originality of his esthetic conceptions.

As originality of matter and conception must sooner or later necessitate originality of form, we find that that mastery over musical form which Mr. Paine had so perfectly acquired, did not stand him in so good stead, as his original conceptions began to develop themselves, as it had while his æsthetic conceptions were more or less the reflex of other minds. Indeed, the old finished perfection of form began gradually to disappear from his compositions as the matter grew in strength and vitality. His power of completely realizing his conceptions has decreased. In fact, we may say that his ideal has slipped the leash, and that his life-work is henceforth to be a lifecliase after it. And is this not one of the distinctions between the man of genius and the man of mere talent ? The man of talent always has his ideal where he can drop his pinch of salt upon it, take it in his hand and tangibly present it to the world ; the man of genius follows his high ideal through life, ever drawing nearer to it, without winning it. Saint Peter is a work which it is almost impossible, for us at least, to criticise. Well acquainted as we had thought ourselves with Mr. Paine’s later style, there are many places in the oratorio in which, even after careful study, we cannot as yet find ourselves at home. But even those passages which are puzzling in their unintelligibility, never give the impression that the composer has nothing to say. We feel that they are rather struggles after expression, than after an idea. In some places, — as, for example, in the final chorus, — it seems as if the composer hardly gave himself time to fix, much less to realize his own conception, but was constantly impelled to rush on to something new; so overcharged is the chorus with ideas, so full of but partially assimilated matter. On the other hand he has in some places given the most vivid expression to conceptions of overpowering grandeur, as in the chorus, “The Son of man was delivered into the hands of sinful men.”

Throughout the work Mr. Paine shows a horror of the trivial and commonplace that seems to be genuine and spontaneous. This is by no means rare with composers of the present day, the passion for originality being quite a prevailing one. But in many composers (Goldmark, Svendsen, for instance, et hoc genus omne) this striving after originality seems to be something wholly self-conscious, tempting them on to hideous excesses, while they can only charm us when, forgetful of their self-imposed dignity of original genius, they now and then talk quite pleasantly and even gracefully in their natural, commonplace vein. Mr. Paine, on the contrary, we feel to be most at home when lie is most original. Of straining after peculiarity we see no trace in him.

In Saint Peter the instrumental and vocal parts are the exact complements of each other, the orchestration being an integral feature of the work, not something superimposed upon it. Thus some passages that were perfectly baffling at the rehearsals, with piano-forte, became plain enough when heard with the orchestra. To take one instance among many, the disagreeable effect of the seventh between the soprano and alto in the seventh bar of the chorus, “If ye then be risen with Christ,” which everybody who sang in the chorus must remember as intolerably grating entirely disappeared when the orchestra stepped in. We do not purpose to give a detailed analysis of the work. For this we refer the reader to a previous number.¹ We would only say in conclusion that we know very few works of so great promise as Saint Peter. Faults it undoubtedly has, hut in some passages it rises to a pitch of grandeur and power that we look for in vain in many works of world-wide reputation.

Of the other works performed at the festival it is unnecessary to speak, as they have by this time become familiar as household words to most of our public. Of the manner in which the various works were performed we have little but praise to say. The Society’s chorus has never been in such good singing condition, and the orchestra, of which Theodore Thomas’s orchestra formed the nucleus, ivas by far the best we have yet heard in Boston. The Society undertook to do an immense amount of work, and some of the newly performed compositions suffered from want of sufficient rehearsing with the orchestra; but taken as a whole, the performances were a positive triumph. One little point we would, however, express our astonishment at; namely, that ever since the Thomas orchestra first bit our public with the Träumerei-pianissimo mania, Mr. Zerrahn should have persistently left out the wind instruments in the second half of the Pastoral Symphony in the Messiah. It is an inexcusable bit of sentimentalism.