Mr. Huneker's Musical Essays

MUSICAL criticism that is at once suggestive and simple, original and obvious, is rare in these days of democracy in art. The great mass of writing on musical topics is for popular perusal, with little or nothing to commend it to music lovers who have more than a rudimentary knowledge of the subject. But once in a while there appears a writer who addresses himself to the musical thinker, and whose ideas are expressed in such striking literary language as to render the most recondite of them persuasively clear. Such a writer is James Huneker, whose latest volume¹ of essays has just been published. The collection embraces some essays that are not strictly musical. There is one on Nietzsche, one on Flaubert, the “ Beethoven of Prose ” as he is denominated, and one on Literary Men Who Loved Music. Several of them have appeared in the magazines, and are republished in amplified and otherwise altered form. All are fascinating reading. The volume is inscribed to Richard Strauss, the “ Anarch of Art,” who is the subject of the first essay.

Mr. Huneker has written a brilliant and comprehensive study of Strauss. Even allowing for the natural lean toward his subject of the moment, it is plain that Mr. Huneker pins his faith strongly on the new anarch of art. He finds that Strauss has restored to instrumental music its rightful sovereignty, threatened by the Wagnerian cohorts, that he has revolutionized symphonic music by breaking down its formal barriers, and has filled his tone-poems with a new and diverse content. Big words these. But Huneker goes farther. He does not hesitate to pit Strauss against the master minds of music and to award him the palm. “ Berlioz never dared, Liszt never invented, such miracles of polyphony, a polyphony beside which Wagner’s is child’s play and Bach’s is outrivaled.” One may protest that all this is extravagant, and that prudence would dictate a little more reserve in eulogizing the work of a man of forty, still in his storm and stress period; but one must admit that Huneker has the courage of his convictions, and very firm convictions they seem to be. The other side of the picture, — Strauss’s overemphasis of color schemes and mere size, and his apparent neglect of musical values except as tested by programmatic expressiveness — Mr. Huneker ignores. He concedes that his musical themes, qua themes, are not to be matched with Beethoven’s, but the drift of his argument seems to be that the hypnotic power of Strauss’s music prevents the absence of that melodic invention, which calm, critical judgment would demand, from being noticed. Or, putting it in another way, Strauss’s music may sound better than it is ; and so long as the fact is disguised, and no one the wiser, it is not to be deprecated. However, this is not the place to discuss Strauss, but Huneker ; and he has written an interesting, though extreme, “ appreciation ” of the composer who to-day is unquestionably the greatest figure on the musical horizon.

The essay on Parsifal is more or less a protest against the sudden and exaggerated wave of popular enthusiasm started by the recent production of the opera in New York. As such, it may be taken with the proverbial grain of salt. There is something fascinating in the very extravagance of Mr. Huneker’s critical objurgations. Of the book he says: “ It is a farrago of odds and ends, the very dustbin of his philosophies, beliefs, vegetarian, anti-vivisection, and other fads. You see unfold before you a nightmare of characters and events. Without simplicity, without lucidity, without naturalness — Wagner is the great anti-naturalist among composers — this book, through which has been sieved Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Schopenhauerism, astounds one by its puerility, its vapidity.” He adds that “Wagner spread his music thin over a wide surface,” and sums it all up with the remark that Parsifal is the weakest composition its creator ever planned. But if Mr. Huneker’s thesis finds few supporters, it is by no means untenable, as his able brief proves.

Of Nietzsche, Mr. Huneker has many acceptable things to say, and he gossips entertainingly of Turgenieff, Balzac, Daudet, and George Moore, and their attitude toward music. He has a fine and contagious enthusiasm for the later Verdi, the turning-point in whose career he attributes to his acquaintance with Boïto.

The essay entitled After Wagner — What ? promises more than it gives. Mr. Huneker answers the interrogation with another: “ Why cannot we have the Athenian gladness and simplicity of Mozart, with the added richness of Richard Strauss ? ” And again another : “ Why cannot we accept music without striving to extort from it metaphysical meanings?” To neither question vouchsafes he an answer. And so, as Strauss ends his tone-poem Zarathustra with the world-riddle unsolved, does Mr. Huneker close his latest volume with a question unanswered — and unanswerable.

Mr. Huneker as a critic of music has the faculty of giving one his impressions with unequivocal directness : and his impressions are always worth having. He is a suggestive writer, and in his point of view often original. His command of a facile pen and his feeling for vigorous and picturesque words make his criticism forceful and convincing. Even while one is quite sure that he does not agree with a certain extravagant statement, he finds himself doubting and, under the stress of the brilliant phrasing, almost persuaded. The work of so individual a writer is always welcome. But Mr. Huneker should guard against a dash of cynicism which now and then evinces itself. Sweetness and light are of coequal importance in a critic, — especially a musical critic. Without the former quality his work must fail of permanence.

Lewis M. Isaacs.