Music-Past and Present

IN The Puritans and Music,Percy A. Scholes (Oxford University Press, $8.50) aims to ‘put an end to the circulation of a calumny.’ The Puritans, he maintains, had no objection to music as a recreation and a diversion. If they objected to the organ in church, they nevertheless encouraged its use in the home. During Cromwell’s Protectorate, John Playford carried on a successful music-publishing business. Opera (of a sort) was first introduced in England at this time by Sir William Davenant. There was published in 1661 the Life of one Mrs. S. Perwich, ‘a rarely accomplished Virgin’ whose astonishing musical gifts were the delight of the Puritan community in which she lived. (She died at twenty-five, ‘having, on a visit, been “unhappily lodged in damp Linnen.”‘) The Anglo-Saxon mistrust of music as an unmanly and morally enervating pursuit Mr. Scholes traces to the unpuritan eighteenth century. To this end he quotes, among other things, a curious letter of Cowper’s describing the plight of a friend who ‘seemed to have suffered considerably in his spiritual character by his attachment to music.’

These are a few random samples taken from the mountain of evidence which the author has collected in support of his contention. Much of this information makes amusing and instructive reading, a good deal is somewhat trivial. Mr. Scholes does not try to prove the impossible, being content to show that apart from the suppression of music in church the Puritans did nothing to hinder its development. To claim that they did much to further it would, of course, be absurd. Thus it is almost as though music itself were only accidentally the theme of the book. Its implicit purpose is to vindicate the Puritans against the charge of having been rabidly opposed to all the amenities of life. In this it succeeds, without, however, unsettling one’s conviction that under Puritan rule the amenities did not precisely flourish.

Mendelssohn and His Friends in Kensington, edited by Rosemund Gotch (Oxford University Press, $5.00), is an exceptionally charming collection of letters from two young girls, Fanny and Sophy Horsley, to their aunt and near-contemporary, Lucy Calleott. Mendelssohn (who appears during the first third of the book only) was introduced to the Horsley family by his friend Karl Klingemann at the time of his first visit to London in 1820. By the time these letters start, four years later, he has become an habitué of the house, an old and valued friend whom the sisters discuss without ceremony. His moodiness sometimes amuses and sometimes irritates them. On one occasion he is described as having been ‘very cross and sulky . . . taking no notice of anyone’; on another,‘in the highest spirits . . . laughing at his own jokes.’ On the whole they consider him a ‘generous high-minded creature’ and one who could be the best of company when he chose. ‘Of all the times we have seen him this year and last,’ writes Fanny on the day of his departure for Düsseldorf, ‘we unanimously agree that never was he so brilliant, so droll . . . as this memorable morning.’ He was to be gone two years. What his own feelings toward the Horsleys were is plain from his behavior at this parting. Fanny writes, ‘He turned quite as pale as death, though he had been looking as fresh as a great damask rose all the walk, and his eyes filled with tears. . . . His last words almost were “Oh pray, Mrs. Horsley, pray let me find no changes, let all be the same as ever.‘" Evidently the friendship of the Horsleys contributed much to Mendelssohn’s deep and lifelong attachment to London. It is unfortunate that Henri Ghéon was not content to write a simple handbook of Mozart’s music for amateurs. His taste in musical quotations is excellent and his comments on style (though he is not a musician) are often sound and to the point. There is also a useful list of Mozart gramophone recordings at the end of the book, In Search of Mozart (Sheed and Ward, $4.00). But for all the tenderness and sympathy which he feels for his subject he fails to tell the story of Mozart’s life in a vivid or moving way. For one thing, there is too much moralizing and inveighing against Romanticism. Moreover, like many Frenchmen, M. Ghéon cannot praise Mozart without disparaging everyone else. Even Bach, in his eyes, does not bear too close scrutiny, lest he be found ‘wanting in a certain transparence — the subtlety of a varnish.’ As for Beethoven, he ‘remains, in M. Ghéon’s words, ‘impure and plebeian . . . even in his most polished and concentrated works.’ Such misstatements do Mozart no good.

Sophy and her father were the musicians of the family; Mr. Horsley a composer and organist, Sophy an accomplished amateur pianist. Fanny knew little about music, and John, the brother who made a name as a painter, knew less; or, to be exact, knew less of the feminine art of dissembling ignorance. Sophy describes an evening party at which a pianist played some variations ‘so fast as quite to strike John, who when all the company were gone declared that tho’ Mendelssohn did more wonderful things than that, he did not think he could have played the Variations as quickly. Mamma said “my dear, if you make such ignorant observations you had better hold your tongue,” upon which he took up his candle-stick and went to bed.‘

But the most appealing figure to emerge from these letters is not Mendelssohn, but his friend Dr. Rosen, a young Orientalist of frail health and charming appearance, with whom at least one of the sisters must have been in love. For all her light-heartedness, nothing gave Fanny more pleasure, even at a party, than an opportunity for serious conversation with him. ‘ Everything he says is more worthy to be noted down than the sayings of Sadi I’m sure,’ she writes. And Sophy is no less fervent. Once she had to defend him to some acquaintance who had been ’actually abusing him, Oh I am so hot and hoarse,’Yet Sophy would be puzzled, especially toward the time of the later letters, by fits of silence and prolonged reverie that came over him, or by remarks that were a little too deep for her, or by his lack of humor. Most of all she was puzzled by his want of enterprise with respect to her good-looking sister (Sophy herself was aware of being plain). Perhaps feebleness of health obliged him to hide his feelings. One learns in the Epilogue that he died of a fever at thirtytwo.

But the main emphasis falls on the everlasting issue of Classicism versus Romanticism. Are we, on this side of the Atlantic, too restless or irrational to accept such an æsthetic creed? Or are some of us right in feeling that the criterion expressed by the terms ‘classic’ and ‘romantic’ grows more and more sterile and specious and abstract? No doubt it is largely a matter of racial temperament. M. Ghéon’s opinions are only those of thousands of his cultivated countrymen. If he did not voice them, someone else would; dozens already have. But who has written another Rousseau and Romanticism, or its equivalent, since Professor Babbitt ?

Anyone who is inclined to dismiss Rachmaninoff as a musician of negligible importance would do well to read Oskar von Riesemann’s masterly little life, Rachmaninoff’s Recollections (Macmillan, $3.50). The narrative alternates between chapters set down more or less as the author had them from Rachmaninoff’s own lips, and others in which he fills in the gaps in his own words. Not only are the episodes interesting in themselves, but they are told with absorbing vividness and a decided knack for character drawing. There is no fulsome eulogizing; the personality of Rachmaninoff is allowed to emerge naturally, in its disillusioned aloofness, its simplicity and somewhat joyless power. Above all, he is depicted as a musician of absolute integrity. These are not so common, after all.

THEODORE CHANLER