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Page 39
Much of Brahms' music is bad and ugly music, dead music; it is a
counterfeit and not the true and perfect image of life indeed; and it
should be buried or cremated at the earliest opportunity. But much of
it is wonderfully beautiful--almost but never quite as beautiful as
the great men at their best. There are passages in the Tragic overture
that any composer might be proud to have written. If the opening of
the D symphony is thin, unreal, an attempt at pastoral gaiety which
has resulted merely in lack of character, at anyrate the second theme
is delightful; if the opening of the slow movement is also twaddle,
there are pleasant passages later on; the dainty allegretto is as
fresh and fragrant as a wild rose; and the finale, though void of
significance, is full of an energy rare in Brahms. Then there are many
of the songs in which Brahms' astonishing felicity of phrase, and his
astounding trick of finding expression for an emotion when the emotion
has been given to him, enable him almost to work miracles. And it must
be remembered that all his music is irreproachable from the technical
point of view. Brahms is certainly with Bach, Mozart, and Wagner in
point of musicianship: in fact, these four might be called the
greatest masters of sheer music who have lived. A Brahms score is as
wonderful as a Wagner score; from beginning to end there is not a
misplaced note nor a trace of weakness; and one stands amazed before
the consummate workmanship of the thing. The only difference between
the Wagner score and the Brahms score is, that while the former is
always alive, always the product of a fervent inner life, the latter
is sometimes alive too, but more frequently as dead as a door-mat, the
product of extreme facility and (I must suppose) an extraordinary
inherited musical instinct divorced from exalted thought and feeling.
The difference may be felt when you compare a Brahms and a
Tschaikowsky symphony. Although in his later years Tschaikowsky
acquired a mastery of the technique of music, and succeeded in keeping
his scores clear and clean, he never arrived at anything approaching
Brahms' certainty of touch, and neither his scoring nor his
counterpoint has Brahms' perfection of workmanship. Yet one listens to
Tschaikowksy, for the present at least, with intense pleasure, and
wants to listen again. I have yet to meet anyone who pretends to have
received any intense pleasure from a Brahms symphony.
Brahms is dead; the old floods of adulation will no longer be poured
forth by the master's disciples; neither will the enemies his friends
made for him have any reason to depreciate his music; and ultimately
it will be possible to form a fair, unbiassed judgment on him. This is
a mere casual utterance, by the way.
ANTON DVOR�K
I remember the Philharmonic in its glory one evening, when it had a
couple of distinguished foreigners to a kind of musical high tea, very
bourgeois, very long and very indigestible. One of the pair of
distinguished foreigners was Mr. Sauer; the other, Dvor�k, was the
hero of the evening. Now, whatever one may think of Dvor�k the
musician, it is impossible to feel anything but sympathy and
admiration for Dvor�k the man. His early struggles to overcome the
attendant disadvantages of his peasant birth; his unheard-of labours
to acquire a mastery of the technique of his art when body and brain
were exhausted by the work of earning his daily bread in a very humble
capacity; his sickening years of waiting, not for popular recognition
merely, but for an opportunity of showing that he had any gifts worthy
of being recognised,--these command the sympathy of all but those
happy few who have found life a most delicate feather-bed. Dvor�k has
honestly worked for all that has come to him, and the only people who
will carp or sneer at him are those who have gained or wish to gain
their positions without honest work. There could be no conjecture
wider of the mark than that of his success being due to any charlatan
tricks in his music or in his conduct of life. No composer's
music--not Bach's, nor Haydn's, nor even Mozart's--could be a more
veracious expression of his inner nature; and if Dvor�k's music is at
times odd and whimsical, and persistently wrong-headed and _outr�_
through long passages, it does not mean that Dvor�k is trying to
impress or startle his hearers by doing unusual things, but merely
that he himself is odd and whimsical and has his periods of persistent
wrong-headedness. He is Slav in every fibre--not a pseudo-Slav whose
ancestors were or deserved to be whipped out of the temple in
Jerusalem. He has all the Slav's impetuosity and hot blood, his love
of glaring and noisy colour, his love of sheer beauty of a certain
limited kind, and--alas!--his unfailing brainlessness. His impetuosity
and hot blood are manifested in his frequent furious rhythms and the
abrupt changes in those rhythms; his love of colour in the quality of
his instrumentation, with its incessant contrasts and use of the
drums, cymbals, and triangle; his sense of beauty in the terribly
weird splendour of his pictures, and its limitations in his rare
achievement of anything fine when once he passes out of the region of
the weird and terrible; his brainlessness in his inability to
appreciate the value of a strong sinewy theme, in the lack of
proportion between the different movements of his works and between
the sections of the movements, and, perhaps more than in any other
way, in his unhappy choice of subjects for vocal works. One stands
amazed before the spectacle of the man who made that prodigious
success with the awful legend of "The Spectre's Bride" coming forward,
smiling in childlike confidence, with "Saint Ludmila," which was so
awful in another fashion. And then, as if not content with nearly
ruining his reputation by that deadly blow, he must needs follow up
"Saint Ludmila" with the dreariest, dullest, most poverty-stricken
Requiem ever written by a musician with any gift of genuine invention.
These mistakes might indicate mere want of tact did not the qualities
of Dvor�k's music show them to be the result of sheer want of
intellect; and if the defects of his music are held by some to be
intentional beauties, no such claim can be set up for the opinions on
music which he has on various occasions confided to the ubiquitous
interviewer. The Slav is an interesting creature, and his music is
interesting, not because he is higher than the Western man, but
because he is different, and, if anything, lower, with a considerable
touch of the savage. When Dvor�k is himself, and does not pass outside
the boundaries within which he can breathe freely, he produces results
so genuine and powerful that one might easily mistake him for a great
musician; but when he competes with Beethoven or Handel or Haydn, we
at once realise that he is not expressing what he really feels, but
what he thinks he should feel, that he is not at his ease, and that
our native men can beat him clean out of the field. To be sure, they
can at times be as dull as he, but that is when they forget the lesson
they should before now have learnt from him, when they leave the field
in which they work with real enjoyment and produce results which may
be enjoyed.
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