Contemporary American Composers Part 4

It is his individuality. He could make the same reply to such criticism that Schumann made; he thinks in strange rhythms and hunts curious effects, because his tastes are irrevocably so ordained.

But we ought to show a new genius the same generosity toward flaws that we extend toward the masters whose fame is won beyond the patronage of our petty forgiveness. And, all in all, I am impelled to prophesy to Loomis a place very high among the inspired makers of new music. His harmonies, so indefatigably searched out and polished to splendor, so potent in enlarging the color-scale of the piano; his patient building up, through long neglect and through long silence, of a monumental group of works and of a distinct individuality, must prove at some late day a source of lasting pride to his country, neglectful now in spite of itself. But better than his patience, than his courage, than his sincerity, better than that insufficient definition of genius,--the capacity for taking infinite pains,--is his inspired felicity. His genius is the very essence of felicity.

_Ethelbert Nevin._

[Ill.u.s.tration: ETHELBERT NEVIN.]

It is refreshing to be able to chronicle the achievements of a composer who has become financially successful without destroying his claim on the respect of the learned and severe, or sacrificing his own artistic conscience and individuality. Such a composer is Ethelbert Nevin.

His published writings have been altogether along the smaller lines of composition, and he has won an enviable place as a fervent worker in diamonds. None of his gems are paste, and a few have a perfection, a solidity, and a fire that fit them for a place in that coronet one might fancy made up of the richest of the jewels of the world's music-makers, and fashioned for the very brows of the Muse herself.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Autograph of Ethelbert Nevin]

Nevin was born in 1862, at Vineacre, on the banks of the Ohio, a few miles from Pittsburgh. There he spent the first sixteen years of his life, and received all his schooling, most of it from his father, Robert P. Nevin, editor and proprietor of a Pittsburgh newspaper, and a contributor to many magazines. It is interesting to note that he also composed several campaign songs, among them the popular "Our Nominee," used in the day of James K. Polk's candidacy. The first grand piano ever taken across the Allegheny Mountains was carted over for Nevin's mother.

From his earliest infancy Nevin was musically inclined, and, at the age of four, was often taken from his cradle to play for admiring visitors. To make up for the deficiency of his little legs, he used to pile cushions on the pedals so that he might manipulate them from afar.

Nevin's father provided for his son both vocal and instrumental instruction, even taking him abroad for two years of travel and music study in Dresden under Von Bohme. Later he studied the piano for two years at Boston, under B.J. Lang, and composition under Stephen A.

Emery, whose little primer on harmony has been to American music almost what Webster's spelling-book was to our letters.

At the end of two years he went to Pittsburgh, where he gave lessons, and saved money enough to take him to Berlin. There he spent the years 1884, 1885, and 1886, placing himself in the hands of Karl Klindworth. Of him Nevin says: "To Herr Klindworth I owe everything that has come to me in my musical life. He was a devoted teacher, and his patience was tireless. His endeavor was not only to develop the student from a musical standpoint, but to enlarge his soul in every way. To do this, he tried to teach one to appreciate and to feel the influence of such great minds of literature as Goethe, Schiller, and Shakespeare. He used to insist that a man does not become a musician by practising so many hours a day at the piano, but by absorbing an influence from all the arts and all the interests of life, from architecture, painting, and even politics."

The effect of such broad training--enjoyed rarely enough by music students--is very evident in Nevin's compositions. They are never narrow or provincial. They are the outpourings of a soul that is not only intense in its activities, but is refined and cultivated in its expressions. This effect is seen, too, in the poems Nevin chooses to set to music,--they are almost without exception verses of literary finish and value. His cosmopolitanism is also remarkable, his songs in French, German, and Italian having no trace of Yankee accent and a great fidelity to their several races.

In 1885, Hans von Bulow incorporated the best four pupils of his friend, Klindworth, into an artist cla.s.s, which he drilled personally.

Nevin was one of the honored four, and appeared at the unique public _Zuh.o.r.en_ of that year, devoted exclusively to the works of Brahms, Liszt, and Raff. Among the forty or fifty studious listeners at these recitals, Frau Cosima Wagner, the violinist Joachim, and many other celebrities were frequently present.

Nevin returned to America in 1887, and took up his residence in Boston, where he taught and played at occasional concerts.

Eighteen hundred and ninety-two found him in Paris, where he taught, winning more pupils than here. He was especially happy in imparting to singers the proper _Auffa.s.sung_ (grasp, interpretation, finish) of songs, and coached many American and French artists for the operatic stage. In 1893 the restless troubadour moved on to Berlin, where he devoted himself so ardently to composition that his health collapsed, and he was exiled a year to Algiers. The early months of 1895 he spent in concert tours through this country. As Klindworth said of him, "he has a touch that brings tears," and it is in interpretation rather than in bravura that he excels. He plays with that unusual combination of elegance and fervor that so individualizes his composition.

Desirous of finding solitude and atmosphere for composition, he took up his residence in Florence, where he composed his suite, "May in Tuscany" (op. 21). The "Arlecchino" of this work has much sprightliness, and shows the influence of Schumann, who made the harlequin particularly his own; but there is none of Chopin's nocturnity in the "Notturno," which presents the sussurus and the moonlit, amorous company of "Boccaccio's Villa." The suite includes a "Misericordia" depicting a midnight cortege along the Arno, and modelled on Chopin's funeral march in structure with its hoa.r.s.e dirge and its rich cantilena. The best number of the suite is surely the "Rusignuolo," an exceedingly fluty bird-song.

From Florence, Nevin went to Venice, where he lived in an old _casa_ on the Grand Ca.n.a.l, opposite the Browning palazzo, and near the house where Wagner wrote "Tristan und Isolde." One day his man, Guido, took a day off, and brought to Venice an Italian sweetheart, who had lived a few miles from the old dream-city and had never visited it. The day these two spent gondoliering through the waterways, where romance hides in every nook, is imaginatively narrated in tone in Nevin's suite, "Un Giorno in Venezia," a book more handsomely published even than the others of his works, which have been among the earliest to throw off the disgraceful weeds of type and design formerly worn by native compositions.

The Venetian suite gains a distinctly Italian color from its ingenuously sweet harmonies in thirds and sixths, and its frankly lyric nature, and "The Day in Venice" begins logically with the dawn, which is ushered in with pink and stealthy harmonies, then "The Gondoliers" have a morning mood of gaiety that makes a charming composition. There is a "Canzone Amorosa" of deep fervor, with interjections of "Io t'amo!" and "Amore" (which has the excellent authority of Beethoven's Sonata, op. 81, with its "Lebe wohl"). The suite ends deliciously with a night scene in Venice, beginning with a choral "Ave Maria," and ending with a campanella of the utmost delicacy.

After a year in Venice Nevin made Paris his home for a year, returning to America then, where he has since remained.

Though he has dabbled somewhat in orchestration, he has been wisely devoting his genius, with an almost Chopin-like singleness of mind, to songs and piano pieces. His piano works are what would be called _morceaux_. He has never written a sonata, or anything approaching the cla.s.sical forms, nearer than a gavotte or two. He is very modern in his harmonies, the favorite colors on his palette being the warmer keys, which are constantly blended enharmonically. He "swims in a sea of tone," being particularly fond of those suspensions and inversions in which the intervals of the second clash pa.s.sionately, strongly compelling resolution. For all his gracefulness and lyricism, he makes a st.u.r.dy and constant use of dissonance; in his song "Herbstgefuhl"

the dissonance is fearlessly defiant of conventions.

[Music:

... Rose Loset lebenssatt.

Sich, das letzte lose, Bleiche Blumenblatt.

Goldenes entfarben, Schleicht sich durch den Hain, Auch vergeh'n und sterben, Daucht mir suss zu sein.

... failing, From the rose unbound, Falls, its life exhaling, Dead upon the ground.

Golden colors flying, Slant from tree to tree; Such release and dying, Sweet would seem to me.

Copyright, 1889, by G. Schirmer, Jr.

A FRAGMENT FROM "HERBSTGEFuHL."]

Nevin's songs, whose only littleness is in their length, though treated with notable individuality, are founded in principle on the _Lieder_ of Schumann and Franz. That is to say, they are written with a high poetical feeling inspired by the verses they sing, and, while melodious enough to justify them as lyrics, yet are near enough to impa.s.sioned recitative to do justice to the words on which they are built. Nevin is also an enthusiastic devotee of the position these masters, after Schubert, took on the question of the accompaniment.

This is no longer a slavish thumping of a few chords, now and then, to keep the voice on the key, with outbursts of real expression only at the interludes; but it is a free instrumental composition with a meaning of its own and an integral value, truly accompanying, not merely supporting and serving, the voice. Indeed, one of Nevin's best songs,--"Lehn deine w.a.n.g an meine w.a.n.g,"--is actually little more than a vocal accompaniment to a piano solo. His accompaniments are always richly colored and generally individualized with a strong contramelody, a descending chromatic scale in octaves making an especially frequent appearance. Design, though not cla.s.sical, is always present and distinct.

Nevin's first published work was a modest "Serenade," with a neat touch of syncopation, which he wrote at the age of eighteen. His "Sketch-Book," a collection of thirteen songs and piano pieces found an immediate and remarkable sale that has removed the ban formerly existing over books of native compositions.

The contents of the "Sketch-Book" display unusual versatility. It opens with a bright gavotte, in which adherence to the cla.s.sic spirit compels a certain reminiscence of tone. The second piece, a song, "I'

the Wondrous Month o' May," has such a springtide fire and frenzy in the turbulent accompaniment, and such a fervent reiterance, that it becomes, in my opinion, the best of all the settings of this poem of Heine's, not excluding even Schumann's or that of Franz. The "Love Song," though a piano solo, is in reality a duet between two lovers.

It is to me finer than Henselt's perfect "Liebeslied," possibly because the ravishing sweetness of the woman's voice answering the sombre plea of the man gives it a double claim on the heart. The setting of "Du bist wie eine Blume," however, hardly does justice either to Heine's poem, or to Nevin's art. The "Serenade" is an original bit of work, but the song, "Oh, that We Two were Maying!"

with a voice in the accompaniment making it the duet it should be,--that song can have no higher praise than this, that it is the complete, the final musical fulfilment of one of the rarest lyrics in our language. A striking contrast to the keen white regret of this song is the setting of a group of "Children's Songs," by Robert Louis Stevenson. Nevin's child-songs have a peculiar and charming place. He has not been stingy of either his abundant art or his abundant humanity in writing them. They include four of Stevenson's, the best being the captivating "In Winter I get up at Night," and a setting of Eugene Field's "Little Boy Blue," in which a trumpet figure is used with delicate pathos.

Nevin's third opus included three exquisite songs of a pastoral nature, Goethe's rollicking "One Spring Morning" having an immense sale. Opus 5 contained five songs, of which the ecstatic "'Twas April"

reached the largest popularity. Possibly the smallest sale was enjoyed by "Herbstgefuhl." Many years have not availed to shake my allegiance to this song, as one of the n.o.blest songs in the world's music. It is to me, in all soberness, as great as the greatest of the _Lieder_ of Schubert, Schumann or Franz. In "Herbstgefuhl" (or "Autumn-mood") Gerok's superb poem bewails the death of the leaves and the failing of the year, and cries out in sympathy:

"Such release and dying Sweet would seem to me!"

Deeper pa.s.sion and wilder despair could not be crowded into so short a song, and the whole brief tragedy is wrought with a grandeur and climax positively epic. It is a flash of sheer genius.

Three piano duets make up opus 6; and other charming works, songs, piano pieces, and violin solos, kept pouring from a pen whose apparent ease concealed a vast deal of studious labor, until the lucky 13, the opus-number of a bundle of "Water Scenes," brought Nevin the greatest popularity of all, thanks largely to "Narcissus," which has been as much thrummed and whistled as any topical song.

Of the other "Water Scenes," there is a shimmering "Dragon Fly," a monody, "Ophelia," with a pedal-point of two periods on the tonic, and a fluent "Barcarolle" with a deal of high-colored virtuosity.

His book "In Arcady" (1892) contains pastoral scenes, notably an infectious romp that deserves its legend, "They danced as though they never would grow old." The next year his opus 20, "A Book of Songs,"

was published. It contains, among other things of merit, a lullaby, called "Sleep, Little Tulip," with a remarkably artistic and effective pedal-point on two notes (the submediant and the dominant) sustained through the entire song with a fine fidelity to the words and the lullaby spirit; a "Nocturne" in which Nevin has revealed an unsuspected voluptuousness in Mr. Aldrich' little lyric, and has written a song of irresistible climaxes. The two songs, "Dites-Moi"

and "In der Nacht," each so completely true to the idiom of the language of its poem, are typical of Nevin's cosmopolitanism, referred to before. This same unusual ability is seen in his piano pieces as well as in his songs. He knows the difference between a _chanson_ and a _Lied_, and in "Rechte Zeit" has written with truth to German soldierliness as he has been sympathetic with French nuance in "Le Vase Brise," the effective song "Mon Desire," which in profile suggests Saint-Saens' familiar Delilah-song, the striking "Chanson des Lavandieres" and "Rapelle-Toi," one of Nevin's most elaborate works, in which Alfred De Musset's verse is splendidly set with much enharmonious color. Very Italian, too, is the "Serenade" with accompaniment a la mandolin, which is the most fetching number in the suite "Captive Memories," published in 1899.

Nevin has also put many an English song to music, notably the deeply sincere "At Twilight," the strenuous lilt "In a Bower," Bourdillon's beautiful lyric, "Before the Daybreak," the smooth and unhackneyed treatment of the difficult stanza of "'Twas April," that popular song, "One Spring Morning," which has not yet had all the charm sung out of it, and two songs with obbligati for violin and 'cello, "Deep in the Rose's Glowing Heart" and "Doris," a song with a finely studied accompaniment and an aroma of Theokritos.

A suite for the piano is "En Pa.s.sant," published in 1899; it ranges from a stately old dance, "At Fontainebleau," to "Napoli," a furious tarantelle with effective _glissandi_; "In Dreamland" is a most delicious revery with an odd repet.i.tion that is not preludatory, but thematic. The suite ends with the most poetic scene of all, "At Home,"

which makes a tone poem of Richard Hovey's word-picture of a June night in Washington. The depicting of the Southern moonlight-balm, with its interlude of a distant and drowsy negro quartette, reminds one pleasantly of Chopin's Nocturne (op. 37, No. 1), with its intermezzo of choric monks, though the composition is Nevin's very own in spirit and treatment.

In addition to the works catalogued, Nevin has written a pantomime for piano and orchestra to the libretto of that virtuoso in English, Vance Thompson; it was called "Lady Floriane's Dream," and was given in New York in 1898. Nevin has also a cantata in making.

It needs no very intimate acquaintance with Nevin's music to see that it is not based on an adoration for counterpoint as an end. He believes that true music must come from the emotions--the intelligent emotions--and that when it cannot appeal to the emotions it has lost its power. He says: "Above everything we need melody--melody and rhythm. Rhythm is the great thing. We have it in Nature. The trees sway, and our steps keep time, and our very souls respond." In Wagner's "Meistersinger," which he calls "a symphonic poem with action," Nevin finds his musical creed and his model.

And now, if authority is needed for all this frankly enthusiastic admiration, let it be found in and echoed from Karl Klindworth, who said of Nevin: "His talent is _ungeheures_ [one of the strongest adjectives in the German language]. If he works hard and is conscientious, he can say for the musical world something that no one else can say."

_John Philip Sousa._

[Ill.u.s.tration: Autograph of John Philip Sousa]

[Ill.u.s.tration: JOHN PHILIP SOUSA.]