How To Listen To Music Part 21

It is only when musicians divide the question touching the rights and merits of public and critic that they seem able to put a correct estimate upon the value of popular approval. At the last the best of them are willing, with Ferdinand Hiller, to look upon the public as an elemental power like the weather, which must be taken as it chances to come. With modern society resting upon the newspaper they might be willing to view the critic in the same light; but this they will not do so long as they adhere to the notion that criticism belongs of right to the professional musician, and will eventually be handed over to him. As for the critic, he may recognize the naturalness and reasonableness of a final resort for judgment to the factor for whose sake art is (_i.e._, the public), but he is not bound to admit its unfailing righteousness. Upon him, so he be worthy of his office, weighs the duty of first determining whether the appeal is taken from a lofty purpose or a low one, and whether or not the favored tribunal is worthy to try the case. Those who show a willingness to accept low ideals cannot exact high ones. The influence of their applause is a thousand-fold more injurious to art than the strictures of the most acrid critic. A musician of Schumann's mental and moral stature could recognize this and make it the basis of some of his most forcible aphorisms:

"'It pleased,' or 'It did not please,' say the people; as if there were no higher purpose than to please the people."

"The most difficult thing in the world to endure is the applause of fools!"

[Sidenote: _Depreciation of the critic._]

[Sidenote: _Value of public opinion._]

The belief professed by many musicians--professed, not really held--that the public can do no wrong, unquestionably grows out of a depreciation of the critic rather than an appreciation of the critical ac.u.men of the ma.s.ses. This depreciation is due more to the concrete work of the critic (which is only too often deserving of condemnation) than to a denial of the good offices of criticism. This much should be said for the musician, who is more liable to be misunderstood and more powerless against misrepresentation than any other artist. A line should be drawn between mere expression of opinion and criticism. It has been recognized for ages--you may find it plainly set forth in Quintilian and Cicero--that in the long run the public are neither bad judges nor good critics. The distinction suggests a thought about the difference in value between a popular and a critical judgment. The former is, in the nature of things, ill considered and fleeting. It is the product of a momentary gratification or disappointment. In a much greater degree than a judgment based on principle and precedent, such as a critic's ought to be, it is a judgment swayed by that variable thing called fashion--"_Qual pium' al vento._"

[Sidenote: _Duties of the critic._]

[Sidenote: _The musician's duty toward the critic._]

But if this be so we ought plainly to understand the duties and obligations of the critic; perhaps it is because there is much misapprehension on this point that critics' writings have fallen under their own condemnation. I conceive that the first, if not the sole, office of the critic should be to guide public judgment. It is not for him to instruct the musician in his art. If this were always borne in mind by writers for the press it might help to soften the asperity felt by the musician toward the critic; and possibly the musician might then be persuaded to perform his first office toward the critic, which is to hold up his hands while he labors to steady and dignify public opinion. No true artist would give up years of honorable esteem to be the object for a moment of feverish idolatry. The public are fickle. "The garlands they twine," says Schumann, "they always pull to pieces again to offer them in another form to the next comer who chances to know how to amuse them better." Are such garlands worth the sacrifice of artistic honor? If it were possible for the critic to withhold them and offer instead a modest sprig of enduring bay, would not the musician be his debtor?

[Sidenote: _The critic should steady public judgment._]

[Sidenote: _Taste and judgment must be achieved._]

Another thought. Conceding that the people are the elemental power that Hiller says they are, who shall save them from the changeableness and instability which they show with relation to music and her votaries? Who shall bid the restless waves be still? We, in America, are a new people, a vast hotch-potch of varied and contradictory elements. We are engaged in conquering a continent; employed in a mad scramble for material things; we give feverish hours to win the comfort for our bodies that we take only seconds to enjoy; the moments which we steal from our labors we give grudgingly to relaxation, and that this relaxation may come quickly we ask that the agents which produce it shall appeal violently to the faculties which are most easily reached. Under these circ.u.mstances whence are to come the intellectual poise, the refined taste, the quick and sure power of a.n.a.lysis which must precede a correct estimate of the value of a composition or its performance?

"A taste or judgment," said Shaftesbury, "does not come ready formed with us into this world. Whatever principles or materials of this kind we may possibly bring with us, a legitimate and just taste can neither be begotten, made, conceived, or produced without the antecedent labor and pains of criticism."

[Sidenote: _Comparative qualifications of critic and public._]

Grant that this antecedent criticism is the province of the critic and that he approaches even remotely a fulfilment of his mission in this regard, and who shall venture to question the value and the need of criticism to the promotion of public opinion? In this work the critic has a great advantage over the musician. The musician appeals to the public with volatile and elusive sounds. When he gets past the tympanum of the ear he works upon the emotions and the fancy. The public have no time to let him do more; for the rest they are willing to refer him to the critic, whose business it is continually to hear music for the purpose of forming opinions about it and expressing them. The critic has both the time and the obligation to a.n.a.lyze the reasons why and the extent to which the faculties are stirred into activity. Is it not plain, therefore, that the critic ought to be better able to distinguish the good from the bad, the true from the false, the sound from the meretricious, than the unindividualized mult.i.tude, who are already satisfied when they have felt the ticklings of pleasure?

[Sidenote: _The critic's responsibilities._]

[Sidenote: _Toward the musician._]

[Sidenote: _Position and power of the newspaper._]

But when we place so great a mission as the education of public taste before the critic, we saddle him with a vast responsibility which is quite evenly divided between the musician and the public. The responsibility toward the musician is not that which we are accustomed to hear harped on by the aggrieved ones on the day after a concert. It is toward the musician only as a representative of art, and his just claims can have nothing of selfishness in them. The abnormal sensitiveness of the musician to criticism, though it may excite his commiseration and even honest pity, should never count with the critic in the performance of a plain duty. This sensitiveness is the product of a low state in music as well as criticism, and in the face of improvement in the two fields it will either disappear or fall under a killing condemnation. The power of the press will here work for good.

The newspaper now fills the place in the musician's economy which a century ago was filled in Europe by the courts and n.o.bility. Its support, indirect as well as direct, replaces the patronage which erstwhile came from these powerful ones. The evils which flow from the changed conditions are different in extent but not in kind from the old. Too frequently for the good of art that support is purchased by the same crookings of "the pregnant hinges of the knee" that were once the price of royal or n.o.ble condescension. If the tone of the press at times becomes arrogant, it is from the same causes that raised the voices and curled the lips of the petty dukes and princes, to flatter whose vanity great artists used to labor.

[Sidenote: _The musician should help to elevate the standard of criticism._]

[Sidenote: _A critic must not necessarily be a musician._]

[Sidenote: _Pedantry not wanted._]

The musician knows as well as anyone how impossible it is to escape the press, and it is, therefore, his plain duty to seek to raise the standard of its utterances by conceding the rights of the critic and encouraging honesty, fearlessness, impartiality, intelligence, and sympathy wherever he finds them. To this end he must cast away many antiquated and foolish prejudices. He must learn to confess with Wagner, the arch-enemy of criticism, that "blame is much more useful to the artist than praise," and that "the musician who goes to destruction because he is faulted, deserves destruction." He must stop the contention that only a musician is ent.i.tled to criticise a musician, and without abating one jot of his requirements as to knowledge, sympathy, liberality, broad-mindedness, candor, and incorruptibility on the part of the critic, he must quit the foolish claim that to p.r.o.nounce upon the excellence of a ragout one must be able to cook it; if he will not go farther he must, at least, go with the elder D'Israeli to the extent of saying that "the talent of judgment may exist separately from the power of execution." One need not be a composer, but one must be able to feel with a composer before he can discuss his productions as they ought to be discussed. Not all the writers for the press are able to do this; many depend upon effrontery and a copious use of technical phrases to carry them through. The musician, alas! encourages this method whenever he gets a chance; nine times out of ten, when an opportunity to review a composition falls to him, he approaches it on its technical side. Yet music is of all the arts in the world the last that a mere pedant should discuss.

But if not a mere pedant, then neither a mere sentimentalist.

[Sidenote: _Intelligence versus emotionalism._]

"If I had to choose between the merits of two cla.s.ses of hearers, one of whom had an intelligent appreciation of music without feeling emotion; the other an emotional feeling without an intelligent a.n.a.lysis, I should unhesitatingly decide in favor of the intelligent non-emotionalist. And for these reasons: The verdict of the intelligent non-emotionalist would be valuable as far as it goes, but that of the untrained emotionalist is not of the smallest value; his blame and his praise are equally unfounded and empty."

[Sidenote: _Personal equation._]

[Sidenote: _Exact criticism._]

So writes Dr. Stainer, and it is his emotionalist against whom I uttered a warning in the introductory chapter of this book, when I called him a rhapsodist and described his motive to be primarily a desire to present himself as a person of unusually exquisite sensibilities. Frequently the rhapsodic style is adopted to conceal a want of knowledge, and, I fancy, sometimes also because ill-equipped critics have persuaded themselves that criticism being worthless, what the public need to read is a fantastic account of how music affects them. Now, it is true that what is chiefly valuable in criticism is what a man qualified to think and feel tells us he did think and feel under the inspiration of a performance; but when carried too far, or restricted too much, this conception of a critic's province lifts personal equation into dangerous prominence in the critical activity, and depreciates the elements of criticism, which are not matters of opinion or taste at all, but questions of fact, as exactly demonstrable as a problem in mathematics. In musical performance these elements belong to the technics of the art. Granted that the critic has a correct ear, a thing which he must have if he aspire to be a critic at all, and the possession of which is as easily proved as that of a dollar-bill in his pocket, the questions of justness of intonation in a singer or instrumentalist, balance of tone in an orchestra, correctness of phrasing, and many other things, are mere determinations of fact; the faculties which recognize their existence or discover their absence might exist in a person who is not "moved by concord of sweet sounds" at all, and whose taste is of the lowest type. It was the acoustician Euler, I believe, who said that he could construct a sonata according to the laws of mathematics--figure one out, that is.

[Sidenote: _The Rhapsodists._]

[Sidenote: _An English exemplar._]

Because music is in its nature such a mystery, because so little of its philosophy, so little of its science is popularly known, there has grown up the tribe of rhapsodical writers whose influence is most pernicious. I have a case in mind at which I have already hinted in this book--that of a certain English gentleman who has gained considerable eminence because of the loveliness of the subject on which he writes and his deftness in putting words together. On many points he is qualified to speak, and on these he generally speaks entertainingly. He frequently blunders in details, but it is only when he writes in the manner exemplified in the following excerpt from his book called "My Musical Memories," that he does mischief. The reverend gentleman, talking about violins, has reached one that once belonged to Ernst. This, he says, he sees occasionally, but he never hears it more except

[Sidenote: _Ernst's violin._]

"In the night ... under the stars, when the moon is low and I see the dark ridges of the clover hills, and rabbits and hares, black against the paler sky, pausing to feed or crouching to listen to the voices of the night....

"By the sea, when the cold mists rise, and hollow murmurs, like the low wail of lost spirits, rush along the beach....

"In some still valley in the South, in midsummer. The slate-colored moth on the rock flashes suddenly into crimson and takes wing; the bright lizard darts timorously, and the singing of the gra.s.shopper--"

[Sidenote: _Mischievous writing._]

[Sidenote: _Musical sensibility and sanity._]

Well, the reader, if he has a liking for such things, may himself go on for quant.i.ty. This is intended, I fancy, for poetical hyperbole, but as a matter of fact it is something else, and worse. Mr. Haweis does not hear Ernst's violin under any such improbable conditions; if he thinks he does he is a proper subject for medical inquiry. Neither does his effort at fine writing help us to appreciate the tone of the instrument. He did not intend that it should, but he probably did intend to make the reader marvel at the exquisite sensibility of his soul to music. This is mischievous, for it tends to make the injudicious think that they are lacking in musical appreciation, unless they, too, can see visions and hear voices and dream fantastic dreams when music is sounding. When such writing is popular it is difficult to make men and women believe that they may be just as susceptible to the influence of music as the child Mozart was to the sound of a trumpet, yet listen to it without once feeling the need of taking leave of their senses or wandering away from sanity. Moreover, when Mr. Haweis says that he sees but does not hear Ernst's violin more, he speaks most undeserved dispraise of one of the best violin players alive, for Ernst's violin now belongs to and is played by Lady Halle--she that was Madame Norman-Neruda.

[Sidenote: _A place for rhapsody._]

[Sidenote: _Intelligent rhapsody._]

Is there, then, no place for rhapsodic writing in musical criticism?

Yes, decidedly. It may, indeed, at times be the best, because the truest, writing. One would convey but a sorry idea of a composition were he to confine himself to a technical description of it--the number of its measures, its intervals, modulations, speed, and rhythm.

Such a description would only be comprehensible to the trained musician, and to him would picture the body merely, not the soul. One might as well hope to tell of the beauty of a statue by reciting its dimensions. But knowledge as well as sympathy must speak out of the words, so that they may realize Schumann's lovely conception when he said that the best criticism is that which leaves after it an impression on the reader like that which the music made on the hearer.

Read Dr. John Brown's account of one of Halle's recitals, reprinted from "The Scotsman," in the collection of essays ent.i.tled "Spare Hours," if you would see how aptly a sweetly sane mind and a warm heart can rhapsodize without the help of technical knowledge:

[Sidenote: _Dr. Brown and Beethoven._]

"Beethoven (Dr. Brown is speaking of the Sonata in D, op.

10, No. 3) begins with a trouble, a wandering and groping in the dark, a strange emergence of order out of chaos, a wild, rich confusion and misrule. Wilful and pa.s.sionate, often harsh, and, as it were, thick with gloom; then comes, as if 'it stole upon the air,' the burden of the theme, the still, sad music--_Largo e mesto_--so human, so sorrowful, and yet the sorrow overcome, not by gladness but by something better, like the sea, after a dark night of tempest, falling asleep in the young light of morning, and 'whispering how meek and gentle it can be.' This likeness to the sea, its immensity, its uncertainty, its wild, strong glory and play, its peace, its solitude, its unsearchableness, its prevailing sadness, comes more into our minds with this great and deep master's works than any other."

That is Beethoven.

[Sidenote: _Apollo and the critic--a fable._]

[Sidenote: _The critic's duty to admire._]

[Sidenote: _A mediator between musician and public._]