Music

ON the 18th of February Robert Schumann’s Paradise and the Peri was brought out at the eighth Symphony Concert of the Harvard Musical Association, by the Cecilia Club under the direction of Mr. B. J. Lang. Tnis, the first performance of one of Schumann’s choral works in Boston, was in many respects a fine one. Our new choral society, the Cecilia, may especially congratulate itself upon having got through with an inordinately difficult task in a most creditable manner. The difficulties the chorus had to encounter, and which they most triumphantly conquered, were neither few nor light. Perhaps the least of them was the intrinsic difficulty of the music itself. The choral part of Paradise and the Peri is in many places as nearly impossible as vocal writing well can be. Schumann’s knowledge of the capabilities of the human throat was slight, at best, and it almost seems as if in writing this score, the composer, rather at a loss to know exactly what singers could or could not do, had cut the Gordian knot by taking it for granted that they could do almost anything. The final chorus of the first part, for instance, might well make even the most courageous Chorus mistrust its own powers, written as it is with apparent total disregard of the fact that even the longest-winded singers must be allowed to draw breath sometimes. But, as we have said, the Cecilia came out triumphant; after what severe rehearsing one almost trembles to think of. Under Mr. Lang’s pitiless bâton, woe to the luckless singer who made even the smallest slip! Back he and the rest of the chorus must go to the beginning of the phrase, until perfection crowned the work. But what superb results were gained ! The chorus sang with authority. If all else went wrong, one felt sure of their being right. Unfortunately much else did go wrong ; and here we come to the chief difficulty the chorus had to meet. The orchestra (rather a hetecogeneous body, if we may say it) had to play an unusually difficult work, wholly new to them, and in an unaccustomed style, under a conductor with whose ways they were not familiar, after only three rehearsals! In fact, matters looked so threatening at the last rehearsal, that it showed no mean amount of courage in Mr, Lang, rather new to the trade as he was, to face his task at all on the afternoon of the concert. He rose to the height of the occasion, however, and pulled his forces through much better than could have been anticipated. Another trouble was that the solo singers, with the notable exception of Miss Welsh, the contralto, were discouragingly unfamiliar with their parts. With whom the fault lay we do not know, but the fact is that several excellent artists were placed in a very false position. A conductor can do much towards infusing life into a timid chorus or orchestra, but before a soloist who does not know her part through and through so as to be able to sing it with assurance, the best conductor who ever wielded bâton is helpless. The solo singer ought to be the real leader in a performance ; the conductor’s position is simply that of accompanyist; he should never have to take the initiative. He accompanies the singer with chorus and orchestra, instead of at the piano forte. At rehearsals and in all preliminary studies his word should be law ; there should be no manner of dispute between the singers and him. He is the absolute ruler and infallible authority. He has to teach the chorus and orchestra to follow him, but to teach the solo singers to lead him as he wishes to be led. At the performance he steps down from his throne and puts the reins into the singer’s hands. What then is the ill-starred conductor to do, when the singers, instead of singing like autocrats in their own right, and to the manner born, hang breathless upon every movement of his bâton, and seem to hesitatingly ask his permission for every note they utter ? What hold can the greatest singer who ever breathed have upon an audience when she has to think of two things at once ? She may sing —

until she is hoarse, but the only thing the public will hear will be: “I hope to heaven that I shall keep my place ! ” Imagine a peri going to heaven, counting her bars ! Our respect and admiration for the many and fine artistic qualities of Mrs. H. M. Smith and Mr. George L. Osgood are not one whit lessened by what we heard in the Music Hall the other afternoon. We know of no singers in the country whom we should rather have seen in their places. They simply attempted the impossible, and, if we may be allowed to say so, they owed it to their own reputation, that of their conductor and the Cecilia Club, —we will even say, strange as it may sound in this country, they owed it to their audience, — not to attempt it. It is needless to say that the Harvard Musical Association owed it to the singers and orchestra to have allowed them many more rehearsals. A part of the shortcomings of the singers are no doubt to be attributed to the necessarily inefficient condition of the orchestra (for which the orchestra was by no means to blame); but to show that this is only a part of the evil, we will merely men lion the really charming effect Miss Welsh (a far less experienced singer than either of the others) made, simply by knowing her part so well that she could sing as if, so far as she was concerned, orchestra, chorus, and conductor had no existence. It is, of course, ridiculous to suppose that artists like Mrs. Smith and Mr. Osgood could sing their parts, even though they were reading at sight, without doing much that was fine. The parts of the Peri and the tenor are extremely difficult, and are written, as was Schumann’s wont, with royal disregard for the compass of the soprano and tenor voice. Upon the whole, the performance was rather good than poor; it was only so much less good than the excellent executive material warranted ! Admitting the disastrous conditions under which the work was given, it would not be too much to say that the performers and conductor covered themselves with glory.

About the composition itself we might write volumes, but mercifully will not. It is, in fact, hardly yet time to do so. Schumann’s work depends so much upon a sympathetic rendering, much more than Mendelssohn’s choral works, the singer has to read so much between the lines, that we hardly feel that the public can have got an adequate enough idea of the work from the performance of the other afternoon, for us to talk about it intelligibly and to any real purpose. We anxiously await another performance. As a mere confession of faith we are willing to own almost unbounded admiration for the work.

— Dr. Chomet’s The Influence of Music on Health and Life¹ is undeniably a curious work. The fact alone that it is an attempt to bring music within the already extended catalogue of materia medica shows a certain daring originality of conception. The doctor’s Theory of Sound, and explanation of the acoustic properties of sonorous bodies, is not less strikingly original. We will merely quote what seems to us a significant passage in Dr. Chomet’s book, and leave our readers to draw their own inferences. The doctor says : —

“If we but recall the nature of imponderable fluids, such as heat, light, and electricity ; if we admit, what is accepted as truth by the whole world, that these fluids, either latent or apparent, are developed through the changes, or simply the modifications of all bodies, whether solid, liquid, or gaseous, changes produced by blows or friction, by chemical composition or decomposition; again, if we recall the readiness of almost all bodies in nature to be impregnated by one or more of these imponderable fluids, it will be very interesting to see if, when sound is produced in resonant bodies, there is not an escape of some fluid, like magnetism, heat, electricity, light, which themselves are different manifestations of one and the same fluid; if, in a word, we may not be allowed to admit the existence of a sonorous or musical fluid; the name matters little.

“ If the production of sound, or of the sonorous fluid, be developed under the same conditions and circumstances as other imponderable fluids, if it follow the same laws, if, like them, it give rise to similar phenomena, shall we not have some ground, some reason to suspect its existence ? As for me, I unhesitatingly admit it.”

In as far as the doctor bases the therapeutic application of music upon his own peculiar hypothesis, we must look upon his medical theories with distrust. He however gives some very interesting examples in which music has had an undeniable physical effect upon living organisms, which examples may well give serious cause for reflection.

The more purely musical part of the book, the chapters on the character of music and musical history, are not uninteresting, albeit written with the calm, unquestioning conviction of an amateur, whose knowledge of his subject does not extend far below the surface. Enthusiasm is not wanting, and at times the author seems in danger of being embarrassed by the number of greatest composers he has to deal with. Some of his opinions can at worst provoke a smile ; such as, for instance, —

“ We cannot hesitate to admit that Rossini, up to the present time, is the greatest and most finished composer that the nineteenth century has yet seen.”

Some of us may remember that the present century was well out of its teens when a certain man, “ not without talent,” ² died in Vienna, by name Ludwig von Beethoven !

Upon the whole, the doctor’s tendency to “ evolve the camel from his own consciousness ” is rather a marked one. His catalogue of the various characteristics of national music, resulting from differences of climate and temperature, is so delightfully systematic, so exactly as it would be convenient to have them, that one is almost tempted to believe in it.

The translator seems to be as well aware of the questionable points in the book as any one, and openly states in the preface that she cannot agree with the doctor’s theories. We all owe her a debt of gratitude for putting a book of such undoubted originality of thought within reach of the English-reading public, and who knows but Dr. Chomet may at last find us all at his feet, doing homage to his newly promulgated hypothesis of sound?

The translation is, upon the whole, very good and clear, though without any pretensions to brilliancy of style, which, by the way, we strongly suspect the original French to have been somewhat deficient in. Only in a very few places are we led to think that the translator has mistaken the author’s meaning. One misstatement we would however call attention to, and that is in the translator’s foot-note to page 46; a misstatement that she may very likely have been drawn into by a corresponding one implied in the text. Dr. Chomet says, in speaking of the old Grecian modes, “Later, several modes were again added: the Hyper-Dorian, Hyper-Lydian, Hyper-Phrygian, Hypo-Dorian, Hypo Lydian, and Hypo-Phrygian.” The translator’s foot-note says, “ As the Greek prefix indicates, these additional modes differ from the original ones by the position of the key-note ; it being in one case above, in the other below. For instance, the key-note of the HyperDorian is four tones above that of the Dorian, that of the Hypo-Dorian four tones below it.” Thus the key-note of the Dorian mode being as nearly as possible our modern D, the key-note of the Hyper-Dorian would be A, and that of the Hypo-Dorian G, making the Hyper-Dorian and HypoDorian two different modes, as Dr. Chomet seems to imply that they were. This is wrong. Leaving out of the question that the Dorian is an authentic mode, and the Hypo-Dorian its relative plagal mode, that is, that they both have the same key-note D, — only that in all authentic modes the keynote (Grundton, or fundamental note) falls upon the first degree of the scale, and in the plagal modes upon the fourth, — we will point out that the hyper modes begin their scale a fifth higher than the corresponding authentic modes, and the hypo modes a fourth lower. Thus if the Dorian scale begins on D, the Hyper-Dorian will begin on A, and the Hypo-Dorian also on A. Hypo and hyper are, in fact, only different names for essentially the same thing.

— Professor F. L. Ritter’s History of Music ³ is one of the most excellent books of the sort that we know. To sound learning, above all an exhaustive knowledge of his subject, the author unites rare critical acumen and catholicity of spirit. We should, perhaps, be tempted to call him too little of an extremist, were it not evident that the middle ground he holds between the extreme classicists (so called) and the modern radical Naturalisti⁴ comes from carefully and conscientiously formed convictions, and not from indecision and timidity. Ritter is by no means one of those pitiable tertium quids who sit tottering on the fence, yearning for what they instinctively like in art, yet not daring openly to break with what they know to be respectable and of good repute. Ritter is none of these, but a man capable of looking through the husks of things and finding real meaning in the kernel, free enough from all prejudice to give that meaning its full weight. His style is wonderfully direct and compact, perhaps a thought dry, but this may be the unavoidable result of great condensation. His estimate of the merits and demerits of composers and schools of music is to our mind almost invariably just, and founded upon true comprehension of what is eternal in art, unbiased by all that is merely transient and accidental. Especially excellent is what he says of Mendelssohn and Schumann. Mendelssohn has been the unfortunate object of more superlatives, both admiring and execrative, than any other composer, with perhaps the exception of Richard Wagner. He is hardly ever mentioned save in hysterics. Ritter shows a very just appreciation of what fire all this smoke has come from. His notice of Berlioz is upon the whole the best and most intelligent appreciation of that little comprehended composer that we have yet seen. The remarks upon church music are excellent, as far as they go, but, to our thinking they only touch one side of that exceedingly knotty question, and that is the æsthetic one.

— We have before us the piano-forte score of Ruth and Naomi,⁵ a Scriptural Idyl in the guise of a cantata, by Leopold Damrosch. We have always had, and still have, an unreasonable unwillingness to say much about a work of this sort before hearing it. We know that omniscience is the indispensable attribute of a critic, and that we ought to be able to see, or rather scent out, all the faults or beauties of the most complex score from even the most imperfect piano-forte arrangement. But we really cannot. The work seems to us to contain much that is genuine and strong, especially in the choruses, together with much that is unspontaneons and, so to speak, manufactured. In Ruth’s air, “ Entreat me not to leave thee,” for example, the perpetual employment of enharmonic modulation, the wandering off to distant keys so that every time the theme returns in the original key it springs upon you as from round the corner, can only be called tricky. The following chorus, “ Thy mercy, O Lord,” is really fine, and has a certain Händel smack to it, which is especially grateful after the dilutions of Mendelssohn that most young composers give us nowadays. Naomi’s prophecy, “ Hail, hail, the Lord is with me,” is particularly striking and effective, we had almost said powerful. The chorus which follows it (the last in the work) is, all things considered, the best of all. The opening adagio theme is peculiarly beautiful. We have a suspicion, though it would be difficult to tell why, that the work is very finely instrumented. At all events we hope to have a chance to hear it performed, when we can form some genuine opinion as to its merits.

— Of a very interesting collection of Swedish and Finnish songs we have before us Stjernan, by Karl Collan, and Tuol on mun Kultani, of very old Finnish origin.⁶ The piano-forte accompaniments to these songs are uncommonly well written, which is saying much, as some of the older ones, the Einnish song, for instance, present some difficulties to the harmonist. The last-mentioned song bears evident marks of being originally written on a different musical scale from ours. As for the songs themselves, they hardly come within the province of criticism. The folk-song is to be reverenced and accepted as beautiful, almost as a work of nature is. We do not criticise or analyze a rose, otherwise than chemically, to make attar of roses. Poetry we can write about it, but rhapsodizing does not happen to be our trade. We are very glad to see so copious a collection of genuine, pure people’s-music offered to the public in so acceptable a shape.

— We most heartily recommend Dr. Von Bülow’s edition of Cramer’s piano-forte studies.⁷ It is an invaluable addition to this class of music. There is hardly a pianist, certainly no teacher, living, who cannot learn something from Von Bülow, The man positively shows a genius for fingering.

— Baby’s Eyes,⁸ by Ailie E. Ropes, is carefully written, and shows a good appreciation of the effect that can be drawn from certain languid, dreamy discords. It has rather the air of the work of a beginner who is a thought over-anxious to exhaust all his musical resources at once, but it is still refined and quite pleasing.