Musical studies and silhouettes

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Sociology in Music . . • i

Beethoven, and His Nine Symphonies .135 Italian Music and the Last Two Operas

I

*'The conception of the art of music, as of all other arts," writes Guyau, "must play a part, more and more important, in the coherency of the human race, and in that fellowship of men's consciences, that complete physical and mental sympathy, which tends towards the uniting of the individual life and the life collective. The supreme aim of art, as of morals, is to raise the individual out of himself, and to identify him with his race."

Such is our point of departure, and this, our theme to develop. As we set forth, this, at least, may be assumed as certain ; — that, as philosophy and science create a community of ideas, and morals, a community of the will, so art, like the religion, which it here so much resembles, establishes a communion of sentiment in human hearts ; and possesses, thus, a marvellous power of unifying and of socialising, as it were ; for nothing is so individual, so intrinsically our own, as the voice of the senses. Through them men differ, more than through the intelligence, and under their power it is, that each one of us finds himself most at variance with his fellow-man : nothing which we possess is so personal as our sensibilities and therefore so precious. What we feel is our own, and, yet, superior to ourselves; *'my love,"

Guyau has well said, '* is more alive and a thing of truth, than am I myself." Upon the altar of their sensibilities men offer the greatest sacrifices of their lives, — lay even life itself; for it is of the senses, — I use the word in its highest acceptation, — no less than of the intelligence, that the heroic exaltation of the martyr is conceived ; and the reasonings of great hearts are, for the most part, along paths to which the feet of reason are strange. He who dies for his faith, dies not so much, perhaps, for the dogmas or even the creed of that faith, as for the love which it enfolds. — But why talk of dying > Humanity lives and lives upon its highest plane, more through a community of sentiments than of ideas ; most men would rather feel than think alike, for to know the same things is not enough, we must know, — and love. The solution of the social problem will be, not in the fraternity of minds, but of souls, and, if it should indeed prove, as has been prophesied, that science is dethroned, the crown will fall from her brow, because, though she drew all men to her knees by the sceptre of intelligence, she was powerless to knit together the hearts of any two of her subjects.

Thus art is the incomparable agent of sociology, or comparable only to religion, which lives, as does art, in the realm of the senses ; and thus, more perhaps, even, than truth, is beauty the begetter of unanimity, for the crowd is more easily captured by the awakening of its passions, than by the cultivating of its ideas ; — by emotion rather than by proof. What mathematical demonstra-/ tion will excite in an assembly the enthusiasm,: roused by the harmonies of a symphony, or even' by the song of a single human voice ? Or what^i savan ever bowed to such applause as is showered upon a favourite tenor ? Science even borrows from art certain phrases, with which she loves to deck herself : the solution of the problem is "graceful," and Guyau suggests to us as "beautiful/' the sight of " an intelligence following a path and proposing to itself an end, to arrive at which, it scatters all obstacles," or the idea of " a human will, with which we sympathise, whose struggles and toils and triumphs we love " ; and, again, " in the impassioned intensity of its search, a train of reasoning, which leads to a discovered truth, is beautiful."

Art is, therefore, a fact or a phenomenon essentially sociological because it is essentially a phenomenon or a fact of the senses. "That which is of the most importance," an old and gentle friend of my childhood used to say, " is to lose sight of oneself." In very truth, this is the great thing needful, the supreme article of the beautiful, as of the moral ; — the beauty and the blessing, most Godlike, of genius, as of virtue I The artist must lose sight of himself, or rather see himself, only as for others ; must consider himself as belonging to his fellows, and as having been created for, or, above all, as the creator of their profit and their pleasure. And so we verify the definition of art given by Guyau : *' the development of society through the senses." So art becomes charity and, as the Divine law has willed that they should, the beautiful and the good are one in their mission. ** Love God with all thy heart . . . Love thy neighbour as thyself/' — no commandment is greater than these, and art, preaching to us the love rather than the knowledge of one another, establishes the great precept of the Spirit, — the supremacy of love.

IL

Of all the arts, music is the most sociological.

Sound is the great social factor: " the sympathetic and social instincts are at the bottom of all the pleasures of the ear, and the greatest charm of sound, to a human being, is that it is so essentially expressive, making him a sharer in the joys and, above all, in the sorrows of his fellow-creatures. . . . The sorrow of the voice moves us more deeply, than that expressed in face or gesture."^ Nature and art bear witness to this social value of sound, for, with a voice attuned to truer nicety than that of action or of light, it reveals and expresses existence. If the deaf are sadder, as a rule than the blind, it is because the sense of hearing is more necessary than that of sight, to the perception of the life about us. The desert lies, as though lifeless, beneath the burning kiss of the sun ; bearing the semblance of death, because so motionless, doubtless, but, above all, because it breathes in a very hush of silence, upon the threshold of " infinite space." It was under the spell of the silence, and not of the shadows, of this infinity that Pascal shuddered.

Or passing from the material to the aesthetic, we find no artifice so cunning as that of music to evoke the very semblance of life itself. No marble Orpheus can call up the tears that some melodious Orpheus can sing into our eyes, and beneath the ceiling of the Sistine chapel, or before the tomb of the Medici, Beethoven might even dare to say: " Behold, if this sorrow be equal to my sorrow." Or what joy, indeed, could ever equal his joy ? — Go listen to the Finale of the " Eroica," or of the symphony in C-minor, ' Guyau.

and ask yourself from which painting of Rubens, let it breathe forth never so exalted a triumph, does there well out such a flood of happiness ?

Music owes this faculty of creating life and so arousing our sympathies, to its analogy to language. As has been justly said : *' Music has gathered to herself all the true characters of the language of instinct, to the immeasurable accentuation and enrichment of this last." ^ And thus she is, and will ever remain, herself, a language, that of the senses and not of the intellect ; a natural tongue, neither manufactured nor conventional, more closely affiliated with the sentiments which it expresses, than the language of words and more adequate. Wagner has left us his thoughts, to which we cannot turn too often, upon the common origin of the two, and their ultimate separation ; upon the rights of music to live, and to become a language. 'Mssue, originally," he says, "■ of a signification of words, which was entirely natural, and personal, — the creation of the senses, — the written language of man developed in a direction, more and more abstract, till words became only conventional signs ; feeling lost all participation in the use of vocables, and the order and connection of these last fell into

* From the very interesting work of M. Jules Combarieu ; " Les Rapports de la musique et de la poésie.

lo Sociology in Music.

an absolute dependence upon rules which must be, of necessity, acquired. In their parallel development, customs and language were alike subjected to conventions no longer intelligible to natural sentiments, and which could only be comprehended through reflection, which must receive them as inculcated maxims. While the modern languages of Europe, separated into their different branches, have followed on, with a more and more decided tendency to a purely conventional perfection, music, for its part, has developed into a power of expression, never before imagined. It is as though human sentiment, under the pressure of civilised conventionalities, had torn asunder its bonds, seeking an issue, which would permit it to follow the laws of its own language, and to express itself in a manner which is to it intelligible, with an entire liberty and complete independence of the logical laws of thought. . . . The modern development of music has responded to a deep need of humanity, and, notwithstanding the halting of its tongue in logic's ears, it speaks to the heart of man, with a victorious power of which that same logic has never dreamed." ^

Influencing, thus, sensibility, as it does, it is the affinities of the senses, which music ever establishes. Indeed let us make no other pretensions * Quoted by M. Jules Combarieu, op, cit.

Sociology in Music. ii

on her behalf, for, should we succeed in dragging her from her rightful domain, she would find some musician to lead her home. In response to the claim of a friend, that all things might find their expression through music, Grétry once said, " I would agree with you, if you could order by music, your dinner, in this restaurant, which we are about to enter." The author of " Richard Cœur de Lion" was right ; music does not say all that there is to be said, — it has no speech for those of us, who would ask for bread.

But man does not live by bread alone, and the following anecdote is the welcome complement of that of Grétry. Beethoven, they say, once went to see a mother, who was mourning the death of her child. She advanced to meet him, but he turned from her to the piano without saying a word. For a long time he played and then rose silently and left the house. Music accomplished that day its highest mission to men, carrying, to a suffering heart, a sweeter sympathy and perhaps a deeper consolation than speech can ever know.

Not only between men, but between men and animals, — between, even animals themselves, music establishes mutualities, which, vague though they be, she alone can create. The animal recognises only the musical elements of language, — the timbre, the intonation, the intensity of sound : it is the intonation, affectionate or severe, and not the sense of our words, which attracts or rebuffs them ; they obey the voice, not the speech. Brute beasts, indeed, are not insensible to musical instruments themselves : the serpent listens to, perhaps understands, the flute of the charmer, and the hearts of horse and warrior beat in unison, as the trumpet sounds the charge. The " Ranz des Vaches" is the best known, but not the only example of the sociological effect of music upon animals : when the bull in the arena obstinately refuses to fight, they send towards him other cattle, with bells about their necks, and the bell rather than the sight of his companions, the tinkling of the little bell, with the remembrance and the hope of the prairies in its voice, charms from out the inclosure, the animal who had shrunk instinctively from death. Or who doubts that music creates mysterious ties between the herdsman and his flock ? Interpreter of sympathies and of mutual tenderness, while neither flock nor, perhaps, shepherd are aware of her ministrations, she voices the humble life which they live together upon the bosom of a common mother. And thus she establishes kindly, almost fraternal relations between man and the lower creatures, — between the master and his servants :

she extends the reign of charity and love, and a kindred soul to that of the saintly Francis of Assisi, who went about redeeming lambs from butchery, and calling them his brothers, often pours forth in song, from the lips of some roughhanded shepherd.

It is through music that we communicate, or, best of all, commune with nature ; for nature is the great musician, and he who has eyes to see, but no ears to hear her beauties, is in danger of never really knowing her. If the echo is no longer the voice of the nymph, weeping for the beautiful youth whom she loved, but who loved none but himself, — it is still a voice : the voice of woods, rocks and waters and all those mighty forces, which, were they dumb, we should be forever strangers to, but whose friendship is our glad possession, from the moment of our first sympathy of intercourse. Yes, nature strikes the note of kinship with ourselves in her harmonies, as well as in her pageants, and ever lightens, if but for a moment, the obscurity of her soul, in response to our call :

" O flots, que vous savez de lugubres histoires.

******* Vous vous les racontez en montant les marées, Et c'est ce qui vous fait ces voix désespérées Que vous avez le soir quand vous venez vers nous."

It needs not a poet to hear the sighing of the wind, or the laughter or weeping of the watercourse and when Madame de Sévigné likened the nightingale to the "leaf that sings," she well knew that, now and again, men must doubt whether the night song, which soothes them, is of the birds or of the leaves.

In a certain page of Bizet's " L'Arlésienne " we may find an admirable example of the universal sympathy which music creates. — It is evening, along the border of one of the marshy ponds of Camargue ; Frederic leans his head on the shoulder of Balthazar, — the old man and the child who have suffered and wept together. After a time they move slowly away, the stage is deserted and the breath of the orchestra alone sets the reeds by the water's edge a trembling. Melancholy envelops the scene : all, — to those distant shepherds and their flocks, — the stagnant lake on the immense plain, — all shrink beneath a common sorrow, while sweet, sad chords of music create a sympathy of unrest and sorrow, between man and brute and nature herself.

Again and notably, the sociological nature of music is made apparent in the incontestable fact, that this is the most popular of the arts. Music for the people exists in every land the earth round, but we may search in vain for anything akin to it in painting, sculpture or architecture ; jit is the only art in which the impersonal genius and the anonymous soul of the crowd participates. And why ? Because, following a happy formula of Emile Hennequin : " the perception of the feelings is more commonly appealed to through the sense of hearing, than through that of sight." As a usual thing, indeed, the former faculty is the more acute.

And truth lies in De Musset's words ; nothing greater is needed oftentimes, than the sigh from the breast of a child, to create music which mother and angels will bend the ear to hear.

Music, too, is the only art susceptible of close association with the major part of the acts, individual and social, of our lives. Music follows us from birth to death ; she sings beside our cradle, she kneels before the door of our tomb ; in religion and in war she is ever present ; at the dance and at the banquet, at every solemnity and at every feast. Songs for the table and songs of repose are always in the air ; and from that almost elementary but most essential of all the social relations, — I mean that of love, music may never alienate herself. Far from startling lovers apart, she entrances them ; so well she understands them, that, to her, they instinctively turn. " If music be the nourisher of love, then play on forever, give me more than I can bear. . . . Oh I It falls on my ear like the soft south wind, which breathes upon a bank of violets, discovering and begetting perfume." So sings the beautiful, enamoured prince in the " Soir des Rois."

But it is the way of the humble, that this art smoothes with kindliest touch ; it was the cobbler and not the financier, who " sang from morning till night," and of all those who labour and suffer, music is the companion and consoler. She presides over and sweetens the rough working-days of common labourers and peasants, and the cultivation of the soil is accompanied by songs of ploughing and of seed-time, songs of harvesting and reaping, beautiful and free ; '* songs rising to the great winds of heaven." Oh, lovely choruses of spinning-girls, and of maidens washing their linen by the stream, songs of the mills and of the flails, beating the air, in rhythm to the dance of the golden grain, songs of the grape-gatherers treading out the purple juice, — of you, is born the supreme folk-music of the world, — that of primitive humanity and of its consecrated labour. And while your incense rises from the earth, other melodies akin to you, float upon the waters ; for, like the labourer at his plough, fishermen and gondoliers bend, singing, over their oars, till the very waves are melodious. From far across the seas, too, on distant shores, wild and well-nigh fabulous to us, thousands of voices rise before the mosques of Stamboul, or beneath the palms of the Nile ; for the souls of multitudes, in that mysterious Orient, break silence, in the songs of muezzin and of cameleer. There is often an unexpected likeness between these exotic chants and our own melodies: the notes of the biniou, — that quaint bag-pipe of Brittany, — of the flute of Cairo and of the Andelusian guitar strangely resemble one another. And yet this need not sur-, prise us ; music is the great interpreter of international unanimity, and, while many systems of words, scarcely suffice, but one economy of sound is necessary to the translation of the elementary but world-wide emotions of humanity. The sonorous forms, thus created by universal genius, are taken possession of by the genius of the individual, appropriated and used as the foundation of its masterpieces.

However carefully we turn over the music leaves of the past, we meet everywhere the song of the people ; as a master of this subject has said : the popular song is the " substratum upon which the successive layers of music have accumulated from 2 its earliest formations, to the present time." ^ Popular melodies are to be found everywhere in the chants of the Latin church, during the Middle Ages ; are the only representatives, moreover, at that time, of poetry and of music, outside of the church. The gentle art of the Troubadours sprang from the songs of the people, and those songs, too, it was, which gave birth, a little later, to the vocal polyphony of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The great masters of counterpoint, Josquin des Prés, Orlando di Lasso and Palestrina built in popular motives, even intonations, as the very corner-stone of their architecture, and M. Tiersot assures us that, from the time of Dufay to that of Carissimi, the single theme of *' L'Homme Armé," alone, inspired nineteen masses and two songs. Nor when, from polyphony, the art of music returned to monody, did the popular element become eliminated from the structure ; and if, later, its power weakened in the French opera of the seventeenth century, it was again renewed in the Opéra-comique of the eighteenth.

But it is not only within the confines of France that folk-music has lived with an influence, which has made itself felt ; Bach has treated the chorals

1 Histoire de la chanson populaire en France, by M. Julien Tiersot ; Pion, Nourrit and Co., and Heugel, Paris.

of the Lutheran liturgy in a thousand ways, all of them beautiful, and the choral is in close kinship with the song. Many of these canticles of the church sprang from nothing more sacred than the profane airs of the sixteenth century, which, changed in rhythm and accent, and modified by the association of pious words, have thus found their definite form. Haydn, chapel-master of Prince Esterhazy, and a resident of Eisenstadt, which was but a little way from the country of the Croatian tongue, has introduced into his works more than one melody of that land ; one of them, but little modified, becoming the famous Austrian Hymn ; ^ while popular Hungarian melodies figure in many a symphony of the master. Mozart in his " Magic Flute," and, more particularly, in the rôle of Papageno, was inspired by the street music of the Viennese, and Beethoven, in certain of his quartettes, has used Russian national themes. The influence of the " Ranz des Vaches " in the musical development of Rossini's "William Tell," is much greater than we might thoughtlessly suppose/ but no one is

Ï See an article on this subject, by Dr. H. Reimann, in the "Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung," of October 13, 1893.

2 De la mélodie populaire dans le " Guillaume Tell " de Rossini, by E. van der Straeten. See also chapter entitled : " La nature dans la musique " in the author's work on « Psychologie musicale. "

ignorant of the part which Luther's " Ein feste Burg" plays, in the " Reformation Symphony" of Mendelssohn, or in Meyerbeer's " Les Huguenots." Weber and Schubert again, were the great musicians of the people, greater, even, in this regard, than Wagner himself: and, to-day, M. Grieg, master as he is, stands for music as the art of the people ; while, in the Russian school, the utilising of national themes has remained, since the days of Glinka, one of its most fixed and fertile principles.

And so, down all the length of history, the paths of individual genius and of the genius of the multitude, have run side by side, often intersecting. The latter rendering up all which it possessed of simplicity, truth and purity ; confiding its ill-defined thoughts, its vague passions, desires and dreams ; unbosoming its humble joys and its hidden sorrows ; while from these primitive but sacred materials, that other spirit of personal genius has composed its great definitive works of art : choosing and developing, ordering and organising ; elevating instinct to conscience and fortifying sentiment with reason. In a word, rendering a hundredfold, for that which it has received ; while in the meantime, by this constant communication, by this perpetual interchange of service and benefit, the sociological ideal has been realised ; for thus, are the upper and the lower classes knit together, as the hearts of the great touch the greater heart of humanity.

Music is often called society's art, and, though, in a sense, vulgar, the expression does not lack significance, for, of all the arts, music is the popular cause or pretext for mutual association ; — fanfares and hurdy-gurdies afford, alas, only too striking a proof of the fact. Men come together in greater and more enthusiastic numbers at the call of music, than to gaze at pictures or marbles or the beauties of architecture. There are no festivals but those of music, and no such crowd of pilgrims wends it way towards the Parthenon, or the Hermes of Praxiteles, or the Madonna of the Sistine chapel, as that which throngs the road to the theatre of Bayreuth. The public of the summer-gardens crowd around the military bands, rather than the statues, and the Parisian pleasure-seeker is abandoning the Louvre, more and more, for the Sunday concerts. Music in its very demand for silence, stifles every discordant, importunate and alien voice, demanding too that, in and through her influence, all should be as one. It is only too true, that she rarely obtains this unity, — almost never that silence which she loves ; but it is her right and of her nature to strive towards this ideal, and the whole force of her influence, and our complete possession of her are purchased only at this price. Most music is written to be heard by the many, and that sad, young king, in his empty theatre, deprived the art to which he accorded his proud and lonely homage, of much of its high dignity. Even more, each musical genre appeals to and commands its particular audience. There exists a sort of correlation and of necessary proportion, between those who perform and those who listen ; a study, indeed, of the quartette, symphony and opera, from a sociological point of view, might not be impossible.

Music, or to speak with more precision a musical work, is more than a work, it is a thing of proportions, — almost a being, collective and social : the terms alone of the musical language, — accord, harmony, concert, — prove this. In music, moreover, as in architecture, the elements are united by relations of mathematical precision ; but while, in architecture, the combinations or groups so formed, are inanimate and dumb, those of music move and speak, or rather sing, possessing thus a twofold life, for which we search in vain, in the most beautiful shapes of marble and stone. All music is thus socially alive ; even an isolated melody is multiple, in the sense that it is constituted of periods, — members of a phrase, repeating themselves, — ever séparâting and reuniting. Again, from the moment in which harmony joins with melody and accompanies it, a new fellowship is established and more numerous relations are produced. Who ; has listened to the Adagio of Beethoven's sonata in '^ C-sharp minor, without feeling the sweet, consoling friendliness, with which the arpeggios envelop the broken-hearted song ? Or_what is the Fugue, if not the most rigorous of associations between the elements or the creations of sound ? And the same may be said of the Variation, in a freer and more pliable sense. The contrast between certain variations of Handel and the "Etudes symphoniques " of Schumann, is most strikingly apparent, from our present point of view, though both works consist only of a theme and its variations.

But just what, then, is expressed by the term, "a theme and its variations " ? An evolution of forms, or rather of multiplied and changing forces, under the dominating influence of a superior and unintermitted force ; a sort of economy, a living, sentient hierarchy ; a certain system of relations between the number and the unit, between the individual and the group. But in the work of Handel and that of Schumann, these relations are regulated by laws which are absolutely opposed. Calm and dignified, HandeFs theme is followed up, in all simplicity, by five "doubles" as they were called ; and well called, for such variations consist of little more than a numerical augmentation of more and more rapid values, in a regular procession of two and two. Other than this, no change of measure or of rhythm creeps in ; all conflict is avoided, all passion is absent, from the voices, which are ever more numerous, but no one of which ever wanders from its path, or allows itself to contradict or to contest. Everywhere accord and unanimity dwell in mutual assent, creating a genial, happy association, sufficient to maintain in a certain order and discipline, a remembrance of the theme, accepted and obeyed by all. But what do we find when we turn to Schumann? In the first place, a harsher and yet, less decisive theme ; sadder and at the same time less firm : and instantly we feel that it brings us war, not peace ; that it comes to divide, not to unite. The first " Etude symphonique " announces, at once, an impending revolt, which bursts forth magnificently in the second, as the voices of wild, solitary, protesting souls, refuse to submit, or even to be associated, with one another. Thenceforth, each variation frees itself from restraint, one by fantasy and caprice, another by egotism and pride ; the idea, which should command, becomes the slave, — sometimes the victim, and is despised, perverted, well-nigh done to death.

This "beautiful disorder" is, doubtless, a *' production of art," of a sublime art, which touches and moves us to-day more than that of Handel ; and, yet, it is disorder. Instead of a hierarchy, this is an independence, which is almost anarchy ; in any case, a social representation and a sociological ideal, which is in absolute opposition to that of Handel.

Xh re e_ele ments , or three factors, it was said by Guyau, constitute the social character of the aesthetic emotion, and it would seem, that these same three social characteristics form the framework of the musical idea.