Tempo di Valse
From THE ALLIED ARTS, PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES, 1920, pp. 204–06.
First printed in the Smart Set, Sept., 1919, p. 40
THE WALTZ never quite goes out of fashion; it is always just around the corner; every now and then it returns with a bang. And to the sore harassment and corruption, I suspect, of chemical purity. The popular dances that come and go are too gross to be very dangerous to civilized human beings; they suggest drinking beer out of buckets; the most elemental good taste is proof enough against them. But the waltz! Ah, the waltz, indeed! It is sneaking, insidious, disarming, lovely. It does its work, not like a college-yell or an explosion in a munitions plant, but like the rustle of the trees, the murmur of the illimitable sea, the sweet gurgle of a pretty girl. The jazz-band fetches only vulgarians, barbarians, idiots, pigs. But there is a mystical something in “Wiener Blut” or “Künstlerleben” that fetches even philosophers.
The waltz, in fact, is magnificently improper—the art of tone turned lubricious. I venture to say that the compositions of Johann Strauss have lured more fair young creatures to complaisance than all the movie actors and white slave scouts since the fall of the Western Empire. There is something about a waltz that is irresistible. Try it on the fattest and sedatest or even upon the thinnest and most acidulous of women, and she will be ready, in ten minutes, for a stealthy smack behind the door—nay, she will forthwith impart the embarrassing news that her husband misunderstands her, and drinks too much, and is going to Cleveland, O., on business tomorrow.
Richard Strauss
From VIRTUOUS VANDALISM, DAMN! A BOOK OF CALUMNY,
1918, pp. 56–57
IF, after hearing an unfamiliar Strauss work, one turns to the music, one is invariably surprised to find how simple it is. The performance reveals so many purple moments, so staggering an array of lusciousness, that the ear is bemused into detecting scales and chords that never were on land or sea. What the exploratory eye subsequently discovers, perhaps, is no more than our stout and comfortable old friend, the highly well-born hausfrau, Mme. C Dur—with a vine leaf or two of C sharp minor or F major in her hair. The trick, of course, lies in the tone-color—in the flabbergasting magic of the orchestration. There are some moments in “Elektra” when sounds come out of the orchestra that tug at the very roots of the hair, sounds so unearthly that they suggest a caroling of dragons or bierfisch – and yet they are made by the same old fiddles that play the Kaiser Quartet, and by the same old trombones that the Valkyrie ride like witch’s broomsticks, and by the same old flutes that sob and snuffle in Tit’l’s Serenade. And in parts of “Feuersnot” – but Roget must be rewritten before “Feuersnot” is described. There is one place where the harps, taking a running start from the scrolls of the violins, leap slambang through (or is it into?) the firmament of Heaven. Once, when I heard this passage played at a concert, a woman sitting beside me rolled over like a log, and had to be hauled out by the ushers.
Bach at Bethlehem
From the Baltimore Evening Sun, May 30, 1923. For many years, after my annual visit to Bethlehem, I wrote an article on it for the Evening Sun. This is an early example, much abridged
A DUSTY, bottle-green hillside rising from a river front made harsh and hideous by long lines of blast furnaces; the sunshine blazing down through a haze shot through with wisps of golden orange smoke. Thick woods all the way to the top. In the midst of the solid leafage, rather less than half way up, half a dozen stretches of dingy granite, like outcroppings of the natural rock. Coming closer, one discovers that they are long, bare, stone buildings—the laboratories, dormitories and so on of Lehigh University. Low down the hillside one of them stands up more boldly than the rest. It is Packer Memorial Church, a huge tabernacle in austere, apologetic pseudo-Gothic, with a high square tower—the chapel, in brief, of the university, made wide and deep to hold the whole student body at once, and so save the rev. chaplain the labor of preaching twice.
It is here that the Bach Choir, for years past, has been lifting its hosannas to old Johann Sebastian—a curious scene, in more ways than one, for so solemn and ecstatic a ceremonial. Bethlehem, in the main, surely does not suggest the art of the fugue, nor, indeed, any form of art at all. It is a town founded mainly on steel, and it looks appropriately hard and brisk—a town, one guesses instantly, in which Rotarians are not without honor, and the New York Times is read far more than Anatole France. But, as the judicious have observed in all ages, it is hazardous to judge by surfaces. Long before the first steel míll rose by the river, the country all about was peopled by simple Moravians with a zest for praising God by measure, and far back in 1742 they set up a Singakademie and began practising German psalmtunes on Saturday nights. The great-great-grandchild of that Singakademie is the Bethlehem Bach Choir of today.
What, indeed, is most ástonishing about the whole festival is not that it is given in a Pennsylvania steel town, with the snorting of switching-engines breaking in upon Bach’s colossal “Gloria,” but that it is still, after all these years, so thoroughly peasant-like and Moravian, so full of homeliness and rusticity. In all my life I have never attended a public show of any sort, in any country, of a more complete and charming simplicity. With strangers crowding into the little city from all directions, and two takers for every seat, and long columns of gabble in the newspapers, the temptation to throw some hocus-pocus about it, to give it a certain florid gaudiness, to bedeck it with bombast and highfalutin must be very trying, even to Moravians. But I can only say that they resist the temptation utterly and absolutely. There is no affectation about it whatever, not even the affectation of solemn religious purpose. Bach is sung in that smoky valley because the people like to sing him, and for no other reason at all. The singers are business men and their stenographers, schoolmasters and housewives, men who work in the steel mills and girls waiting to be married. If not a soul came in from outside to hear the music, they would keep on making it just the same, and if the Packer Memorial Church began to disturb them with echoes from empty benches they would go back to their bare Moravian church.
I can imagine no great public ceremonial with less fuss to it. No committee swathed in badges buzzes about; there is none of the usual sweating, fuming and chasing of tails. If one has a ticket, one simply goes to one’s pew, plainly numbered on a simple plan, and sits down. If one lacks a ticket, one is quite free to lie in the grass outside, and listen to the music through the open doors. No bawling of hawkers is heard; a single small stand suffices for the sale of programs and scores; there is no effort to rook the stranger. The cops have nothing to do save tangle the light traffic; there is no confusion, no parade, no noise save from the railroad yards. The conductor slips into his place unnoticed; when a session is over he slips out the same way. It is indeed not a public performance at all, in the customary sense; it is simply the last of this year’s rehearsals—and as soon as it is over next year’s begin.
Opera
From The ALLIED ARTS, PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES, 1920, pp. 197–200.
First printed in the New York Evening Mail, Feb. 22, 1918
OPERA, to a person genuinely fond of aural beauty, must inevitably appear tawdry and obnoxious, if only because it presents aural beauty in a frame of purely visual gaudiness, with overtones of the grossest sexual provocation. It is chiefly supported in all countries by the same sort of wealthy sensualists who also support musical comedy. One finds in the directors’ room the traditional stock company of the stage-door alley. Such vermin, of course, pose in the newspapers as devout and almost fanatical partisans of art. But one has merely to observe the sort of opera they think is good to get the measure of their actual artistic discrimination.
The genuine music-lover may accept the carnal husk of opera to get at the kernel of actual music within, but that is no sign that he approves the carnal husk or enjoys gnawing through it. Most musicians, indeed, prefer to hear operatic music outside the opera house; that is why one so often hears such l
owly things, say, as “The Ride of the Valkyrie” in the concert hall. “The Ride of the Valkyrie” has a certain intrinsic value as pure music; played by a competent orchestra it may give civilized pleasure. But as it is commonly performed in an opera house, with a posse of fat beldames throwing themselves about the stage, it can only produce the effect of a dose of ipecacuanha. The sort of person who actually delights in such spectacles is the sort of person who delights in gas-pipe furniture. Such half-wits are in a majority in every opera house west of the Rhine. They go to the opera, not to hear music, not even to hear bad music, but merely to see a more or less obscene circus. A few, perhaps, have a further purpose; they desire to assist in that circus, to show themselves in the capacity of fashionables, to enchant the yokelry with their splendor. But the majority must be content with the more modest aim. What they get for the outrageous prices they pay for seats is a chance to feast their eyes upon glittering members of the superior demi-monde, and to abase their groveling souls before magnificoes on their own side of the footlights. They esteem a performance, not in proportion as true music is on tap, but in proportion as the display of notorious characters on the stage is copious, and the exhibition of wealth in the boxes is lavish. A soprano who can gargle her way up to F sharp in alt is more to such simple souls than a whole drove of Johann Sebastian Bachs; her one real rival in the entire domain of art is the contralto who has a pension from a former grand duke and is reported to be enceinte by several stockbrokers.
The music that such ignobles applaud is often quite as shoddy as they are themselves. To write a successful opera a knowledge of harmony and counterpoint is not enough; one must also be a sort of Barnum. All the first-rate musicians who have triumphed in the opera house have been skillful mounte-banks as well. I need cite only Wagner and Richard Strauss. The business, indeed, has almost nothing to do with music. All the actual music one finds in many a popular opera—for example, “Thaïs” – mounts up to less than one may find in a pair of Gung’I waltzes. It is not this mild flavor of tone that fetches the crowd; it is the tinpot show that goes with it. An opera may have plenty of good music in it and fail, but if it has a good enough show it will succeed.
Such a composer as Wagner, of course, could not write even an opera without getting some music into it. In all of his works, even including “Parsifal,” there are magnificent passages, and some of them are very long. Here his natural genius overcame him, and he forgot temporarily what he was about. But these magnificent passages pass unnoticed by the average opera audience. What it esteems in his music dramas is precisely what is cheapest and most mountebankish—for example, the more lascivious parts of “Tristan und Isolde.” The sound music it dismisses as tedious. The Wagner it venerates is not the musician, but the showman. That he had a king for a backer and was seduced by Liszt’s daughter—these facts, and not the fact of his stupendous talent, are the foundation stones of his fame in the opera house.
Greater men, lacking his touch of the quack, have failed where he succeeded – Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Bach, Haydn. Not one of them produced a genuinely successful opera; most of them didn’t even try. Imagine Brahms writing for the diamond horseshoe! Or Bach! Or Haydn! Beethoven attempted it, but made a mess of it; “Fidelio” survives today chiefly as a set of concert overtures. Schubert wrote more actual music every morning between 10 o’clock and lunch time than the average opera composer produces in 250 years, yet he always came a cropper in the opera house.
Music as a Trade
From the Smart Set, June, 1922, p. 46
Music is enormously handicapped as an art by the fact that its technique is so frightfully difficult. I do not refer, of course, to the technique of the musical executant, but to that of the composer. Any literate man can master the technique of poetry or the novel in ten days, and that of the drama—despite all the solemn hocus-pocus of the professors who presume to teach it—in three weeks, but not even the greatest genius could do a sound fugue without long and painful preparation. To write even a string quartet is not merely an act of creation, like writing a sonnet; it is also an act of applied science, like cutting out a set of tonsils. I know of no other art that demands so elaborate a professional training. The technique of painting has its difficulties, particularly in the direction of drawing, but a hundred men master them for one who masters counterpoint. So with sculpture. Perhaps the art which comes nearest to music in technical difficulties is architecture—that is, modern architecture. As the Greeks practised it, it was relatively simple, for they used simple materials and avoided all delicate problems of stress and strain; and they were thus able to keep their whole attention upon pure design. But the modern architect, with his complex mathematical and mechanical problems, must be an engineer before he is an artist, and the sort of engineering that he must master bristles with technical snares and conundrums. The serious musician is in even worse case. Before he may write at all he must take in and coödinate a body of technical knowledge that is about as great as the outfit of an astronomer.
I say that all this constitutes a handicap on the art of music. What I mean is that it scares off many men who have charming musical ideas and would make good composers, but who have no natural talent or taste for the technical groundwork. For one Schubert who overcomes the handicap by sheer genius there must be dozens who are repelled and discouraged. There is another, and perhaps even worse disadvantage. The potential schuberts flee in alarm, but the Professor Jadassohns march in bravely. That is to say, music is hard for musicians, but easy for pedants and quacks. Its constant invasion by tinpot revolutionists is the result. It offers an inviting playground to the jackass whose delight it is to astonish the bourgeoisie with insane feats of virtuosity.
The Music-Lover
From THE ALLIED ARTS, PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES, 1920, pp. 194–96.
First printed in the Smart Set, Dec., 1919, pp. 70–71
OF all forms of the uplift, perhaps the most futile is that which addresses itself to educating the proletariat in music. The theory behind it is that a taste for music is an elevating passion, and that if the great masses of the plain people could only be inoculated with it they would cease to herd into the moving-picture parlors, or to listen to demagogues, or to beat their wives and children. The defect in this theory lies in the fact that such a taste, granting it to be elevating—which, pointing to professional musicians, I certainly deny—simply cannot be implanted. Either it is born in a man or it is not born in him. If it is, then he will get gratification for it at whatever cost—he will hear music if Hell freezes over. But if it isn’t then no amount of education will ever change him—he will remain indifferent until the last sad scene on the gallows.
No child who has this congenital taste ever has to be urged or tempted or taught to love music. It takes to tone inevitably and irresistibly; nothing can restrain it. What is more, it always tries to make music, for the delight in sounds is invariably accompanied by a great desire to produce them. I have never encountered an exception to this rule. All genuine music-lovers try to make music. They may do it badly, and even absurdly, but nevertheless they do it. Any man who pretends to cherish the tone-art and yet has never learned the scale of C major—any and every such man is a fraud. The opera-houses of the world are crowded with such liars. You will even find hundreds of them in the concert-halls, though here the suffering they have to undergo to keep up their pretense is almost too much for them to bear. Many of them, true enough, deceive themselves. They are honest in the sense that they credit their own buncombe. But it is buncombe. none the less.
In the United States the number of genuine music-lovers is probably very low. There are whole States, e. g., Alabama, Arkansas and Idaho, in which it would be difficult to muster a hundred. In New York, I venture, not more than one person in every thousand of the population deserves to be counted. The rest are, to all intents and purposes, tone deaf. They can not only sit through the infernal din made by the current jazzbands; they actually like it
. This is precisely as if they preferred the works of The Duchess to those of Thomas Hardy, or the paintings of the men who make covers for the magazines to those of El Greco. Such persons inhabit the sewers of the bozart. No conceivable education could rid them of their native infirmity. They are born incurable.
The Reward of the Artist
From DAMN! A BOOK OF CALUMNY, 1918, p. 97
A MAN labors and fumes for a whole year to write a symphony in G minor. He puts enormous diligence into it, and much talent, and maybe no little downright genius. It draws his blood and wrings his soul. He dies in it that he may live again. Nevertheless, its final value, in the open market of the world, is a great deal less than that of a fur overcoat, or a handful of authentic hair from the whiskers of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Masters of Tone
From the Smart Set, May, 1912, p. 158
Mencken Chrestomathy (Vintage) Page 62