Musicians and Music-Lovers

PERSONS whose taste for music has brought them in contact with the more cultivated class of musicians must have noticed how difficult it is to talk sympathetically about their art with them. One can rarely broach the subject of music, about which all of us are inclined to express ourselves rather warmly, without having a certain chilling sense that the musician who happens to be present is in no wise a participant in that genial enthusiasm which, one somehow instinctively feels, ought to season the conversation. The musician, at such times, is apt to preserve a monosyllabic aloofness which gives us no very favorable idea of his temper; it seems impossible to force him into sympathy with our own point of view, which is generally an enthusiastic one, and we are tempted to doubt his capacity for more than a dry and purely intellectual enjoyment of his art. If we have the ill luck to fall a-rhapsodizing, in the presence of a musician, over a composition that does not happen to be his own, we are usually met with a condescending stare, which, in spite of its struggles to be polite, says as plainly as may be: “ And pray what do you know about it? ” It is indeed hard to have a wet blanket thus cast over our fine feelings, but did it ever occur to us how difficult it is to talk sensibly about music? Let us honestly put the question to ourselves: Have we anything to say (about the fifth symphony, for example) that is really worth listening to? It is a fact that musical literature, taken all in all, is the poorest the world possesses. When we consider that the publication of even a thoroughly good musical text-book for the use of students is a greater rarity than the discovery of a new planet, it should not be a matter of surprise that general musical literature is so poor as it is. But of all writing or talking about music, the rhapsodical is undoubtedly the flimsiest, as it is, unfortunately, the commonest. Schopenhauer says that of all human beings the most utterly undignified and pitiable is the hero struggling against inexorable fate; so there is nothing more futile than attempting to rhapsodize about music, which is itself the most incomparable of rhapsodies. Man, especially heroic man, is a very glorious creature, but he is not seen to the best advantage when battering his own head against a stone-wall. Sweet poetry and heart - stirring eloquence can illumine most things of this world with a new and heavenly light, but when they try to chant the praises of a Beethoven symphony, you have only to play a few measures of the divine music to make both poetry and eloquence seem very dark indeed. The brightest gas-flame shows black against the sun’s disk.

The trouble is that people deceive themselves. Often, when they think they are talking about music, they are not talking about the music itself at all, but about how it makes them feel. And so the musician, who perceives this very plainly, finding that any discussion on the subject must needs involve certain personalities which may not be entirely palatable to his interlocutor, can only take refuge in silence or in evasive answers.

It is peculiarly noticeable that musicians, among themselves, say very little, as a rule, about the feelings that music calls up in them; they talk about the music itself, and such talk is rarely of a nature to be interesting to an outsider. I remember once listening to an impassioued performance of Schumann’s overture to Manfred in company with a musician. The only thing he said after the performance was, “ How much more effect Schumann has drawn from his horns here, by using the open notes, than he often does by writing chromatic passages for them! ” This was a technical point. As for rhapsodizing about the spiritual essence of the music, my friend very wisely let that alone. I doubt whether, if Shakespeare were alive today, even he could write a good poem about the Manfred overture. About Music (with a capital M) it is indeed possible to speak and write in the poetic vein; but about this or that piece of music poetry can utter only dreariness or nonsense. It is both curious and instructive to note how Hector Berlioz, a man who felt music with almost frightful intensity, and whose excitement while listening to some compositions approached the pitch of frenzy, —to note how Berlioz, in his series of essays on Beethoven’s symphonies, rarely rises above the consideration of technical details.

In judging music, the amateur has only his feelings to guide him. The musician is, at least while listening to a piece of music for the first time, very much in the same case. Yet, from his superior special culture, his feelings are far more trustworthy guides; beauties and imperfections strike his ear at once, and are felt by him instinctively, which it would take much study for the amateur to perceive. And by superior culture I do not mean merely superior special knowledge, but that well-digested knowledge and experience which go to form fine artistic fibre in an organization of naturally æsthetic proclivities. Real genius and original power can be more or less clearly recognized by every one. But I think that the true position which genius holds among the other qualities that go to make up what we call an artist has been very generally — I will not say overrated — but misunderstood. We often observe a seeming tendency in artists to speak slightingly of that heavensent power by virtue of which he who possesses it can at will gain ascendency over the souls of men. A man of wholesomely generous nature reverences that which can work strongly upon his feelings. The apparent inaptitude for this kind of enjoyment that so often strikes us in musicians may be explained by the fact that the musical laity -deceive themselves as they may — are far more prone to yield to the influence of the composer’s or performer’s own personality, as it is revealed to them through the medium of tones, than they are to listen to the music as an entity in itself. The musician is timid about thus surrendering himself, unless the strong individuality of the composer or performer is revealed to him through a perfect medium. As has been said before, his feelings are a much surer guide to him than are those of the amateur, and mere quantity of genius does not command them without a silent protest on his part so long as he is not assured of its fine quality. It is a mistake to think that a high degree of culture blunts the sensibilities; on the contrary, it sharpens them. The musician, studying a Bach cantata in the quiet and solitude of his own room, knows an ecstasy of which the amateur has no conception. It is the very intensity of his feelings that makes him careful how he exposes them to any but the finest and best influences; his soul is a pipe, the stops of which must not be fingered by vulgar hands. Robert Schumann once said, “ I should box the ears of any pupil who wrote such harmony as the first few measures of the overture to Tannhäuser; and yet the thing haunts me with a strange pertinacity in spite of myself.” Most people would call this obstinacy, illiberality, or what not that is bad. But it was the protest of the refined Schumann against a power, the genuineness of which he recognized, but of which the quality seemed to him to be open to suspicion.

That which we call genius in general — genius schlechtweg, as the Germans say — is not so great a rarity among composers as may be supposed; what is rare is distinctly musical genius. Richard Wagner may be called a man of undeniably great power, of very unusual genius; yet we cannot help feeling when hearing his compositions, quite as surely as we know it from reading his autobiography, that it was largely owing to the force of circumstances that his genius was applied to music. We can imagine his attaining to equal eminence in other walks of life. But in listening to a Mozart quartet, we are sure that Mozart was not only a born genius, but a born musician. To be sure, the difference in special musical culture between the two men is very great, and all in Mozart’s favor; but if Wagner’s genius had had the distinctly musical quality of Mozart’s, he could not have rested content until he had acquired an equal degree of musical culture. If Mozart had been a man of Wagner’s quite phenomenal general culture, no doubt his compositions would have shown the effect of it. But the difference between the men would still remain: we should still have Mozart seizing everything by its musical side, making all that he had observed or learned go to further musical ends; whereas in Wagner we feel that his music is the servant of his culture, — that the operation in his case is precisely the opposite to that in Mozart’s. Innate power, whether general or special, is surely a precious thing, and must command reverence whenever it shows itself; yet when we find an expression of power, however genuine it may be, which is unsymmetric and not wholly beautiful, we may well doubt whether the power itself is of the highest kind. An entirely great soul speaks to the world in chosen language; its meaning cannot be conveyed in slipshod sentences; it has a native nobility of its own which shuns the contamination of an ignoble dialect as a gentleman disdains billingsgate. This fact has been so well recognized that what we call the power of expression is often regarded as almost a synonym for genius. It is just the nice shades of distinction between the more or less musical quality of genius which the amateur is for the most part unable to detect. When Schumann said of the many ungainly passages in Berlioz’s Fantastic Symphony that we can appreciate their raison d'être only by attempting to remodel them, and by then seeing how utterly flat our improvements sound when compared with the original, he certainly admitted that Berlioz really had something to say in his music, and that it could be said only in his own way. That is a good earnest of the genuineness of Berlioz’s inspiration, but of its genuineness only. Had the inspiration been as line as it was real, the ungainliness of those passages could not have existed at all. Special musical culture is excessively rare. The world of music a musician lives in is so little comprehended that many of his utterances concerning his art seem hardly to bear the stamp of common sense and reason.

It is by no means true of the amateur that he is generally insensible to the bad effect of what is ugly and cacophonous in music; but his feelings are often shocked by that which is merely unaccustomed, or of which his uncultured power of insight cannot at once detect the relevancy. He is, at times, even prone to reject, as distorted and monstrous, things which the musician will readily accept; he cannot perceive at a glance the true relation of such passages to the remainder of the composition in whicli they occur, in virtue of which relation they appeal to the musician as beautiful and deserving of admiration. Yet, upon the whole, the real or supposed faults that shock the amateur are quite as likely to be of secondary importance as they are to be really damning. The musician may find them retrieved by predominant beauties of which the amateur does not suspect the value, or else he may consider them so trivial in comparison with greater and more essential short - comings, of the presence of which the amateur is equally unsuspicious, as to make them hardly worthy of notice. Again, the amateur may be worked up to a condition bordering upon the ecstatic by certain beauties which the musician appreciates quite as well as he, but which, to the cultivated taste, are wholly unable to retrieve many fundamental faults which are imperceptible to the vulgar ear. That it is, for the most part, utterly useless for the musician to justify his opinion in either case has already been said. Music is a subject upon which all logic is wasted; at the very best, the amateur is but persuaded that he ought to feel differently about this or that composition, but what he actually does feel will remain unchanged, for his musical likings and dislikings are, almost without exception, sheer cases of Dr. Fell, or the contrary.

The general music-lover is apt to value music according to the mood into which it throws him. There are few persons at all amenable to musical impressions who would not indignantly reject the insinuation that this mood is not the result of the music’s working directly upon their higher sensibilities, or, to use the accepted phrase, appealing directly to the heart. But the effect is often purely physical;¹ that is to say, the effect of music, as such, upon the emotional nature of the majority of men is analogous to the effects of alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, bromides, and other similar stimulants or sedatives. It is what Hanslick has aptly called a pathological effect. What other non-physical effect music may have upon their emotions may be referred to the power of association, and is often little determined by the actual character of the music itself. In so far as the power of association is concerned, the most cultured musician is to a great extent amenable to its influence. I know a musician whose father used to sing him to sleep, when he was a very young child, by humming “ Batti, batti,” and “ Vedrai, carino.” To the present day he cannot hear either of these melodies (which, in themselves, have little to do with somnolence) without experiencing a certain pleasurable sensation of drowsiness. He feels persuaded that, had any other melody the same associations for him, its effect would be precisely analogous. But this is only one example of the power of association; there are other ways in which its force is felt, and in which it has a much stronger influence upon the general music - lover than upon the musician. The title of a composition,² the conditions under which it was written, the effect it is known to have had upon this or that notable person, in short, any romantic circumstance connected with it, can exert an influence upon the emotions of which the music by itself would often be incapable. The music only tends to heighten and render more vivid an idea which has already gained ascendency over the listener’s feelings. How strong this power of the association of ideas is may be judged by the manner in which the greater number of music-lovers express themselves when speaking of music, and by the compositions which have won the greatest portion of quasi-sentimental notoriety. If a novelist, public speaker, preacher, scientific lecturer, or other not especially musical person (supposing that he know enough not to go into maudlin raptures over the Æolian harp) have occasion to refer casually to a musical composition, we may be pretty sure that it will be either Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony or Mozart’s Requiem. If not these, it will be the (so-called) Moonlight Sonata, or perhaps the ThunderStorm piece of the Freiburg organist, or something for the vox-humana stop. Now, without calling into question the great intrinsic value of the Pastoral Symphony, it is by no means the one of the glorious nine which is most calculated to captivate the popular taste in a purely musical way. There is little in it, as music, which can entitle it to the singular prominence its name has acquired. But it has a peasant’s dance, a thunder-storm, a breaking forth of sunshine through the clouds, rustling leaves, murmuring brooks, nightingales, and cuckoos; it is interwoven with all sorts of rural associations, things that can be easily talked about, and which call up remembrances that can be definitely placed in our consciousness. In speaking of the Pastoral Symphony the non-musician feels that he is treading upon not entirely unknown ground. As for Mozart’s Requiem, probably not one out of a hundred persons who admiringly mention its name has ever heard a note of it, or knows anything about it, save that it was the composer’s last great work, written at a time when he was in great trouble and misery. Its sublimity is taken for granted. It is not reverenced so much for its musical worth, as it is because it was the swansong of a great and suffering man. Influences of this sort, so all-powerful with the mass of men, are almost without effect upon the musician. He looks upon music as music; the most perfect orchestral thunder-storm in the world leaves him cold and indifferent if it is not at the same time a fine piece of composition. He does not admire a phrase because it cunningly imitates the babbling of a brook, but because it is beautiful music. The ordinary music-lover, in speaking of music, is eager to fix his impressions by the aid of metaphors and similes taken from other arts, or from every-day life. The musician speaks of the entrance of themes, modulations, trombone passages, and the like. In the hundreds of conversations I have had with musicians about music, I can remember only a single instance in which a cultivated musician laid stress upon an extrinsic beauty in a composition; and that was when a certain great German pianist, in speaking of Joachim Raff’s Im Walde symphony, said: “ Oh, that setting in of the gray morning twilight in the finale is overpoweringly impressive.” That is the only time in my life that I have heard a musician speak of music in such fashion. In writing about music, Richard Wagner and Hector Berlioz sometimes indulge in this sort of simile, but even Berlioz, the leader of “programme-composers,” wrote at the end of the descriptive preface to his Fantastic Symphony that the distribution of the “ programme ” among the audience might be optional with the conductor, as he hoped that the symphony itself would have sufficient musical interest. to stand upon its own merits as a composition, apart from the dramatic story with which it was connected. As a foil to what I have told of the “twilight” in Raff’s symphony, I will give an instance of an opposite character. Not long ago I was reading through the second finale of Don Giovanni with a very highly cultivated musician; all ot a sudden he stopped playing, and cried out: “Do you know, it takes a confounded amount of genius to have thought of bringing in that figure again just here! And it is only by a common deceptive cadence, too!” Nobody but a musician could have expressed himself so.

It is a pretty widely spread notion that the uncultured music - lover stands in the same relation to inferior music that the musician does to the great master-works of the art; that the musician enjoys Beethoven’s A major symphony or Bach’s Passacaglia in the same way and to the same extent that other people enjoy the overture to Martha, or even Bardaczewska’s Maiden’s Prayer. As it is impossible to get any direct evidence on this point, inasmuch as we cannot enter into the consciousness of two persons at once, and listen with their cars, we can only found our judgment upon the various emotional phenomena we observe in either class of listeners. A musician, after listening to a great work, does not, as a rule, care to have it immediately repeated.³ If he sees the same work on the programme of a concert on the following day, it will probably not attract him more than would any other piece of equal merit.. But his enjoyment of the composition lasts him a life-time; it increases with every successive hearing, if the performance be a good one. The work is a well of delight to him that can never run dry. But when the ordinary music-lover hears a piece of music that particularly pleases him, he generally wishes to hear it over again; he will listen to it day in and day out, until he gets thoroughly sick of it, and never wishes to hear it more. He sucks and sucks at his musical orange until there is nothing left but the dry peel, and then throws it away. There is, no doubt, a strong sensual element in the musician’s enjoyment of music, but he is not content with this alone; his finely-strung nature protests against completely yielding to the influence of music which he suspects of having a merely ephemeral power over him. He tastes it, as it were, and enjoys its flavor, but is careful to stop short when there is danger of intoxication, for that brings on headache and other undesirable discomforts. He enjoys music platonically, as an art, as something in itself grand and beautiful, not as a stimulant nor an anodyne. That music can act in both these capacities is undoubted, but the musician rarely uses it in either. The simile between music and wine is a very old one, and there is more truth in it, than some modern theorists would have us believe. It does not, of course, cover the whole ground, but it covers part of it very well. There is an enjoyment of wine which is not entirety sensual, for it calls into play the powers of comparison and judgment. The connoisseur and the boor enjoy it in very different ways. The one delights in the wine itself, the other in its effect, and the latter enjoyment to a certain extent precludes the possibility of the former. Substituting music for wine, we have a very good example of the relative points of view of the musician and the musical layman. The difference between them lies not so much in the class of music they enjoy as in the way in which they enjoy it.

It is not easy to decide which one of the elements constituting our modern music,⁴ such as rhythm, melody, quality of sound, harmony, counterpoint, symmetry of form, and thematic development, appeals most directly to the majority of music-lovers. If the question were put, the answer would probably be, in nine cases out of ten, melody. Yet considerable self-deception may exist on this, as on other points. No doubt the average ear demands a quality in music which it can recognize as pleasingly melodious; this is almost a sine qua non; yet I think that sheer quality of sound has, in general, a much greater power over the emotions of the music-loving public than melody pure and simple. And be it remembered that this power is wholly physical. A grand and imposing sonority, a well-timed crescendo or diminuendo, have such command over the nervous excitability of most persons as often completely to silence their habitual demand for purely melodious effects. The choruses “ Crucify him ” in Mendelssohn’s Christus, with their overwhelming effects of sonority, and their total lack of what is commonly called melody, have manv more sincere admirers than the corresponding choruses in Bach’s St. Matthew-Passion, in which the dramatic effect is almost wholly dependent upon the intrinsic character of the melody itself. Last winter a correspondent of one of our newspapers evidently thought he had suggested a conclusive reply to the objections made by some critics to the Verdi Requiem (on the ground that the music depended too much upon sheer effects of sonority) by asking the question: “ Did it ever occur to some people how difficult it is to score a really grand and noble noise ? ”

The first thing that most people notice in a singer is whether he has a fine voice or not; and their opinion of his merit is commonly based upon its quality. Ask the first person you meet whether he thinks Signor X——sings well or not, and he will answer, “ Yes, I think he has a beautiful voice,” or else, “No, his voice is wretched.” The absurd questions one hears put every day, such as, “ Do you prefer instrumental or vocal music? ” and the equally unmusical statements, such as, “ I hate an orchestra, but I adore a brass band ” (the more pallid terms like and dislike are rarely used in such cases), all tend to show how great the power of mere quality of sound is, and how strongly it, affects the musical likings and dislikings of most people. This is also proved by the popularity of instruments of novel or otherwise striking sonority, such as the xylophone, glockenspiel, set of fingerbowls, flowerpotophone, and what not. Some people will hardly notice a tune when played on the piano-forte or by an orchestra, but will go into ecstasies over the same tune (especially if it be of a grandiose and majestic character) when played on a mouth harmonica. Experto crede, I have seen it myself. That the effect of quality of sound per se is purely physical is none the less true because it has a strong influence upon the emotions; a beautiful sound may even provoke tears. I know a contralto singer who can bring tears into some eyes merely by singing a long-sustained A, and singers in general are fond of talking about “ throwing the tears into their voices; ” yes, there are tears in voices, and in onions and cat-o’-nine-tails too, but in very many eases they spring from sheer nervous irritation. When we come to melody, we come to something that can appeal directly to the heart.⁵ But the question is not so much what a melody can do, as what it actually does do in the majority of cases. To make an experiment, take one of the most beautiful and heart-touching melodies in existence, the phrase beginning with the words, “ D’un pensiero, d’un accento rea non sono,” in the second finale of Bellini’s Sonnambula. Let it be sung with fairly correct expression and finish of phrasing by a voice that is in no way distinguished by beauty of timbre, in an average audience the greater number of listeners will be unmoved by it; but let it be sung by a voice of great richness, and especially of fine vibrating quality, and nearly the whole audience will be deeply moved. There is an orchestral arrangement of Schubert’s Serenade which used to be much in vogue some years ago, in which the melody is repeated by various solo instruments, I have always noticed that in this piece the violoncello and oboe left the audience comparatively cold and unsympathizing, but when the cornet-à piston’s turn came, almost every listener was aroused to a high pitch of excitement. The melody was the same, but the thrilling tone of the cornet was what moved the public.⁶ It was only last winter that I overheard one of the audience at a symphony concert saying to a friend, after a performance of Goldmark’s Sakuntala overture : “ You may say what you please, but your Bachs and Mozarts and Beethovens could not produce such a glorious mass of tone as that.” The one thing he looked for in music was plainly its physical effect.

But people will say, Is then our enjoyment of music no more than our enjoyment of champagne? Are our cherished ideas of pathos, sentiment, and the whole great art of tones tugging at our heart-strings a mere delusion, after all? By no manner of means! Hearts are touched, tears do flow, from other causes than mere nervous excitement. The selfdeception is not about the result, but about the cause. It is not so much the music itself that touches the hearts of the majority of music-lovers, as it is the performer. His pathos, sentiment, or passion speaks directly to the hearts of his hearers; so powerful is his influence that he can at times make many listeners forget for the moment the whole sensuous effect of music, which they commonly prize so highly. I have heard a singer whose voice may be said to realize the ne plus ultra of musical harshness, and whose singing, judged from an artistic point of view, is simply atrocious; yet she rarely fails royally to command the emotions of her hearers by the sheer intensity of her dramatic power of expression. What she sings matters little; she is almost invariably sure of enthusiastic applause. This is, of course, an extreme case, but it is by no means unprecedented.

In regard to the appreciation of melody, as such, it may be said that people in general prize a melody more for its sensuous quality than for its thematic value. They consider its immediate sensuous effect: upon the ear, or its dramatic power over the emotions, of more importance than its containing in itself the germs of a stoutly and symmetrically articulated composition.⁷ This is one of the causes of the great popularity of much of the music of the present day with a large class of music-lovers. Although our contemporary music is not so fertile in ear-pleasing melody as was that of an earlier period, it cannot be denied that it is, in general, very rich in more or less melodic phrases of an intense dramatic character, and which are violently exciting in a nervous way. Yet the besetting tendency of much of this music towards incoherence and confuscdness is not so much the result of a want of skill in thematic treatment in contemporary composers, nor of the complexity of the tasks they impose upon themselves, as it is of what might be called the intrinsically unthematic character of their melodies. These melodies appeal strongly to the emotions (whether through the heart or through the nerves matters not), but they too rarely contain in themselves the germs of an orderly composition, and the want of this latter quality is the one of all others which the average musiclover is the last to feel. The theme of Bach’s G minor Fugue is not, by itself, so stimulating to the nerves as the melody of “ Di quella pira; ” yet Bach’s apparently homely figure contains in itself “ the potency and power ” of the whole glorious G minor Fugue, whereas Verdi’s tune contains the potency and power of absolutely nothing beyond its own screeching self. It is the want of appreciation, on the part of the average music-lover, of what may be aptly termed the evolution of a composition from a theme, and of the capacity of a theme for such organic development, that has given rise to a very common, and at the same time most utterly false and groundless fling that is made at the cultivated musician by unthinking amateurs: that is that the musician is capable only of a mere intellectual enjoyment of music. Because the musician lives in a world of tones of which none but him have any approximately correct idea, and in which the uncultured music-lover cannot at once discover the musical alcohol and morphine after which his soul thirsteth; because the musician declares that this alcohol and morphine are not the properest food for an æsthetic soul, he must immediately undergo a contemptuous diagnosis, the result of which is that he is pronounced to be wanting in heart and all the nobler sensibilities, and to cling to art by his intellect alone. No amount of argument will drive this idea out of people’s heads when it has once taken root there; all reasoning falls from their understanding like water from a duck’s back. Let it only be said here most distinctly that, of all the wrong notions that have ever bemuddled the human mind, this is the most utterly idiotic.

People in general listen to music in a dream, as it were; only the musician is fully awake and in sure possession of his faculties. He is not wafted helplessly hither and thither on a vaguely surging sea of sound, an unresisting prey to the composer’s every whim; music is his proper element; as we see the torpid snails and barnacles in a rocky pool by the sea-side suddenly start into consciousness and activity as the first cool, oxygen-charged wave of the returning tide washes over them, so does the musician find in music the life-giving draught that arouses all his nobler faculties to action. It is not an alcohol to intoxicate him, an anodyne to bring mere momentary forgetfulness of the day’s cares and troubles, nor a sense-killing potion to waft him lazily into luxurious hasheesh dreams of a Mahomet’s Paradise; it brings with it the wholesome oxygen that is necessary to his complete vitality. So soon as he is in the presence of a mighty composition, he plunges into the music heart and soul, and his whole being is aroused to vigorous action. As Ambros has said: “ The enjoyment of a work of art is by no means a passive state; a correct understanding, and with it the highest enjoyment, consist in our re-creating for ourselves, as it were, that which is offered us by the composer.”

William F. Apthorp.