A Biography of Sidney Lanier Part 10

"To him as a child in his cradle Music was given, the heavenly gift to feel and to express himself in tones. His human nature was like an enchanted instrument, a magic flute, or the lyre of Apollo, needing but a breath or a touch to send its beauty out into the world.

It was indeed irresistible that he should turn with those poetical feelings which transcend language to the penetrating gentleness of the flute, or the infinite pa.s.sion of the violin; for there was an agreement, a spiritual correspondence between his nature and theirs, so that they mutually absorbed and expressed each other.

In his hands the flute no longer remained a mere material instrument, but was transformed into a voice that set heavenly harmonies into vibration.

Its tones developed colors, warmth, and a low sweetness of unspeakable poetry; they were not only true and pure, but poetic, allegoric as it were, suggestive of the depths and heights of being and of the delights which the earthly ear never hears and the earthly eye never sees. No doubt his firm faith in these lofty idealities gave him the power to present them to our imaginations, and thus by the aid of the higher language of Music to inspire others with that sense of beauty in which he constantly dwelt.

His conception of music was not reached by an a.n.a.lytic study of note by note, but was intuitive and spontaneous; like a woman's reason: he felt it so, because he felt it so, and his delicate perception required no more logical form of reasoning. His playing appealed alike to the musically learned and to the unlearned -- for he would magnetize the listener; but the artist felt in his performance the superiority of the momentary living inspiration to all the rules and shifts of mere technical scholarship.

His art was not only the art of art, but an art above art.

I will never forget the impression he made on me when he played the flute concerta of Emil Hartmann at a Peabody symphony concert, in 1878, -- his tall, handsome, manly presence, his flute breathing n.o.ble sorrows, n.o.ble joys, the orchestra softly responding. The audience was spellbound.

Such distinction, such refinement! He stood, the master, the genius!"*

-- * Quoted in Ward's Introduction to 'Poems'.

He made the same impression on every other artist he ever played for.

Badger called his flute-playing "astonishing"; Wehner, the first flute in Thomas's Orchestra, sought every opportunity to play with him.

Theodore Thomas planned to have him in his orchestra at the time when Lanier's health failed in 1876; Dr. Damrosch said he played "Wind-Song"

like an artist, -- that "he was greatly astonished and pleased with the poetry of the piece and the enthusiasm of its rendering."

His own compositions, too, appealed to men. At times the "fury of creation"

was upon him. During the first winter in Baltimore he wrote a midge dance, the origin of which he thus gives in a letter to his wife: "I am copying off -- in order to try the publishers therewith -- a 'Danse des Moucherons' (midge dance), which I have written for flute and piano, and which I think enough of to let go forward as Op. 1.

Dost thou remember one morning last summer, Charley and I were walking in the upper part of the yard, before breakfast, and saw a swarm of gnats, of whose strange evolutions we did relate to thee a marvelous tale?

I have put the grave oaks, the quiet shade, the sudden sunlight, the fantastic, contrariwise, and ever-shifting midge movements, the sweet hills afar off, . . . all in the piece, and thus -I- like it; but I know not if others will, I have not played it for anybody."*

-- * 'Letters', p. 98.

During this winter and the succeeding one Lanier gave almost his entire time to music. He practiced a.s.siduously, took every opportunity to play with the best musicians, -- both those of his own orchestra and of Theodore Thomas's, -- and often spent evenings with three or four of the choicest spirits he could command.

Hamerik was of special inspiration to him, bringing to him as he did much of the spirit of music that prevailed in German cities.

Lanier studied the technique of the flute, mastering his new silver Boehm, which "begins to feel me," he writes. "How much I have learned in the last two months!" he exclaims. "I am not yet an artist, though, on the flute. The technique of the instrument has many depths which I had not thought of before, and I would not call myself a virtuoso within a year." He suffers agony because he does not attain a point in harmony which the audience did not notice. Writing of the temptation of flute soloists, he once said: "They have rarely been able to resist the fatal facility of the instrument, and have usually addressed themselves to winning the applause of concert audiences by the execution of those brilliant but utterly trifling and inane variations which const.i.tute the great body of existing solos for the flute."*

He fretted because "the flute had been the black beast in the orchestra."

With his mastery of its technique and his own marvelous ability to bring new results from it, he looked forward to the time when it would have a far more important place therein.

-- * 'Music and Poetry', p. 38.

Lanier played not only for the Peabody Orchestra, but for the Germania Maennerchor Orchestra, -- one of the many companies of Germans who did so much to develop music in different parts of the country, -- the Concordia Theatre, charity concerts, churches, and in private homes.

He was very popular in Baltimore. Most of the musicians were Germans, but Lanier was an American and a Southerner, who had graces of manner and goodness of soul. He was a close friend of the Baltimore musicians, such as Madame Falk-Auerbach, a pupil of Rossini's and a teacher in the Conservatory of Music, "a woman who plays Beethoven with the large conception of a man, and yet nurses her children all day with a n.o.ble simplicity of devotion such as I have rarely seen,"

said Lanier. Outside of musical circles he had access to the homes of the most prominent people of Baltimore, in which he frequently played the flute or piano, while members of the family accompanied him. "Memory pictures," says one of his admirers, "that frail, slender figure at the piano, touching with white, shapely hands the chords of Chopin's 'Nocturne'." "He was a frequent visitor to our house,"

says another, "and would often play for us on his beautiful silver flute.

The image of him standing in his rapt pa.s.sion, while he poured forth the entrancing sound, I remember most distinctly."

And while he grew in his mastery of the flute he grew, too, in discriminating study of the orchestra. His first interpretations of orchestral music are rather impulsive -- he goes off into raptures without restraint, even when the occasion is not really of the highest sort.

It is altogether unfair to him to confuse his earlier with his later letters.

As in every other respect, Lanier was growing in intellectual power.

"I am beginning," he writes, "in the midst of the stormy glories of the orchestra, to feel my heart sure, and my soul discriminating.

Not less do I thrill to ride upon the great surges; but I am growing calm enough to see the star that should light the musician, and presently my hand will be firm enough to hold the helm and guide the ship that way.

NOW I am very quiet; I am waiting."* And again, after he has heard Thomas's Orchestra; "I can preserve my internal dignity in great measure, free from the dreadful distractions of solicitude, and thus my soul revels in the midst of the heaven of these great symphonic works with almost un.o.bstructed freedom."**

-- * 'Letters', p. 91.

** 'Letters', p. 110.

One of the plans proposed by Lanier for helping people to understand better the meaning of orchestral music should be mentioned in this connection.

He was always anxious to take every one with him into his kingdom of beauty.

He proposed that, for people living in cities of from three to twenty thousand inhabitants, there should be organized "a Nonette Club, consisting of himself for flute, oboe, clarionet, ba.s.soon, and French horn, and a string quartette. This club would travel through the smaller cities, performing original compositions as well as excerpts from the greatest symphonic orchestral works, and thus educating the ma.s.ses to an understanding of orchestral tonal color, and the relations, in an a.n.a.lytical form, which the wood wind instruments bore to the stringed family. . . . It was his purpose, after each movement of a composition, to lecture on the same, with special reference to the function performed by each instrument, and in the formation of harmonious tonal color."*

-- * Letter from Mr. F. H. Gottlieb to the author.

While Lanier was giving his time to the perfection of his flute-playing and to the study of the orchestra, he became interested in the science of music.

Helmholtz's recent discoveries in acoustics inspired him to make research in that direction. He ransacked the Peabody Library for books on the subject, many of them yet not unpacked.

While few people ever appreciated more the art of music and its spiritual message to men, he realized that there was a science of music as well, "embodying a great number of cla.s.sified facts, and presenting a great number of scientific laws which are as thoroughly recognized among musicians as are the laws of any other sciences among their professors.

There is a science of harmony, a science of composition, a science of orchestration, a science of performance upon stringed instruments, a science of performance upon wind instruments, a science of vocalization; not a branch of the art of music but has its own a.n.a.logous body of cla.s.sified facts and general laws.

Music is so much a science that a man may be a thorough musician who has never written a tune and who cannot play upon any instrument."*

Some of these investigations he afterwards used to good effect in his "Science of English Verse".

-- * 'Music and Poetry', p. 50.

Furthermore, Lanier became interested in the history of music.

In his valuable monograph on "Music in Shakespeare's Time"*

he shows a minute knowledge of Elizabethan music, -- madrigals, dances, catches, and other forms of instrumental and vocal music.

He took great delight in following out through Shakespeare's plays the dramatist's knowledge and appreciation of the art of music.

Indeed, all the people of that time were "enthusiastic lovers of the art.

There were professorships of music in the universities, and mult.i.tudes of teachers of it among the people. The monarch, the lord, the gentleman, the merchant, the artisan, the rustic clown, all ranks and conditions of society, from highest to lowest, cultivated the practice of singing or of playing upon some of the numerous instruments of the time." For the cla.s.s to which he was then lecturing in the Peabody Inst.i.tute he was able to point out and ill.u.s.trate various forms of music and to give biographical sketches of the English musicians of Shakespeare's age.

-- * 'Shakspere and His Forerunners', vol. ii, p. 1.

Lanier was most of all interested, however, in the development of modern music, and especially in orchestral music. He underrated some of the cla.s.sical composers, notably Mozart. He was familiar with the biographies of Chopin, Beethoven, Schumann, and Wagner.

He left behind a translation of Wagner's "Rheingold".

His poems on Beethoven and Wagner indicate his appreciation of their music, while his essays "From Bacon to Beethoven" and "The Modern Orchestra"

show minute knowledge of their work and of the significance of the orchestra in modern life. A better description of Theodore Thomas as the leader of an orchestra has not been written than Lanier's: --

"To see Thomas lead . . . is music itself! His baton is alive, full of grace, of symmetry; he maketh no gestures, he readeth his score almost without looking at it, he seeth everybody, heareth everything, warneth every man, encourageth every instrument, quietly, firmly, marvelously.

Not the slightest shade of nonsense, not the faintest spark of affectation, not the minutest grain of EFFECT is in him. He taketh the orchestra in his hand as if it were a pen, -- and writeth with it."*

-- * 'Letters', p. 92.

If Lanier had been only a successful virtuoso with the flute, the tradition of his playing would have lingered in the minds of at least two generations. Through the reminiscences of college mates, of soldiers and of frequenters of the Peabody concerts, the memory of this genius with the flute would have remained like that of some troubadour of the Middle Ages. It is unfortunate that he left no compositions to indicate a musical power sufficient to give him a place in the history of American music.

It cannot be controverted, however, that he is the one man of letters in America who has had an adequate appreciation of the value of music in the culture of the modern world. To him music was a culture study as much as the study of literature. It was an education to him to hear the adequate representation of modern orchestral works.

Hamerik's plan of giving separate nights to the music of various nationalities was calculated to emphasize this phase of musical culture.

To Lanier, who had never traveled abroad and who did not have time to read the literatures of foreign nations, such musical programmes had the effect of enabling him to divine the places and the life from which the music had come. "I am just come from Venice," he says, "and have strolled home through the moonlight, singing serenades. . . .

I have been playing 'Stradella' and I am full of gondellieds, of serenades, of balconies with white arms leaning over the bal.u.s.trades thereof, of gleaming waters, of lithe figures in black velvet, of stinging sweet coquetries, of diamonds, daggers, and desperadoes. . . .

I cannot tell the intense delight which these lovely conceptions of Flotow gave me. The man has put Venice, lovely, romantic, wicked-sweet Venice, into music, and the melodies breathe out an eloquence that is at once sentimental and powerful, at once languid and thrilling."*

-- * 'Letters', p. 98.