Musical Criticisms Part 13

In 1877 Richter came with Wagner to London, and ever since that year the "Richter Concerts" have been a regular inst.i.tution in this country. In Vienna, the city of his adoption, he is conductor, not only at the opera, but also of the Philharmonic Concerts, and latterly of the music in the Imperial Chapel.

Of late years Richter has conceived a certain dislike to the theatre, where he finds his work beset with small worries. He is coming to regard the concert-hall more and more as his special sphere of activity. Upon Richter's art as a conductor a good-sized book might be written. Here I can attempt no more than to enumerate a few of his qualities:--Practical knowledge of the technique belonging to all the more important instruments; mastery of musical theory in all its branches; an unerring rhythmical sense; judgment and insight with regard to every possible musical style, enabling him always to find the right tempo for any movement or section of a movement (the most important and most difficult thing for a conductor); mastery of the principles discovered by Wagner respecting orchestral dynamics, such as the necessity of equably sustained tone without crescendo or diminuendo, as a basis to start upon the conditions determining proper balance of strings and wind, the nature of a round-toned _piano_ delivery (to be studied from first-rate singers), the manner of producing long crescendos and diminuendos, also of producing a true _piano_ and a true _forte_ (Wagner having pointed out that old-fashioned orchestras never played anything but mezzo-forte); mastery of Wagner's system of phrasing, his far-reaching investigations with regard to _cantabile_ pa.s.sages, his treatment of _fermate_, his distinction between the naf _allegro_ and the poetic _allegro_; mastery and practical realisation of all Wagner's other ideas concerning musical interpretation or public performances, a subject in which Wagner took a far more deep, expert and fruitful interest than any other of the great composers.

Finally, Richter is distinguished from most other conductors by his personal behaviour at the conductor's desk. He is free from antics; every movement has significance and every att.i.tude has dignity.

CHAPTER XIV.

NIETZSCHE.

[Sidenote: =Nietzsche and Wagner.=

_June 18, 1896._]

The intellectual world of the later nineteenth century has no more remarkable and original, and also no more tragic, figure to show than the author of these essays. He was descended from a n.o.ble Polish family originally named Nietzky, who gave up their t.i.tle and estates and settled in Germany on account of Protestant convictions. Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844. He received a cla.s.sical education, and at twenty-eight years of age became Professor of Cla.s.sical Philology in the University of Bale; but throughout life his love of art, and especially of music, remained an absorbing pa.s.sion. It appears that his musical instinct was first aroused by the works of Schumann, and that youthful enthusiasm led to serious musical studies. Later on he became the most ardent of Wagnerians, and finally the fiercest of Wagner's a.s.sailants.

Nietzsche's earliest writings are academic monographs on various cla.s.sical subjects, the brilliant scholarship of which led to his appointment at Bale. The philosophical essays began to appear towards his thirtieth year, during his professorship at Bale. There are verses, too, by Nietzsche which exhibit a genuine poetic faculty. The manner and order of Nietzsche's mental awakening is worthy of attention--first, the love of music, leading to a general interest in art; next, philological studies, originally undertaken, in the opinion of his sister Madame Forster-Nietzsche, as a relief from the feverish problems of modern aesthetics, and pursued to such purpose that he became a master of Roman and Greek learning. His writings also reveal a wide knowledge of Hebrew and Indian literature, besides thorough familiarity with all that is of first-rate importance in modern thought. His first intellectual master seems to have been Schopenhauer. In the year 1889 Nietzsche became hopelessly insane. There is not the least trace of mental disorder in the previous family history. The stocks from which he was descended were on both sides of exceptional energy, ability, and character. There is also abundant testimony to the simplicity, amiability, and charm of his personal character. His friends and colleagues at Bale seem to have had no suspicion of the explosive energies which appear in his writings. His tastes were throughout life reserved and fastidious, and the ultimate breakdown of his mind can only be attributed to the sheer excess of feverish energy with which he lived the intellectual life and to the effects of spiritual isolation upon a sensitive and most arrogant nature. He now lies to all intents and purposes dead at Naumburg-on-the-Saale, in Saxony, which for the past fifty years has been the home of the family.

The present volume contains Nietzsche's latest essays, the publications of 1888. The sub-t.i.tle given to the "Twilight of the Idols," namely, "How to Philosophise with a Hammer," applies equally well to the entire volume, which deals exclusively in destructive criticism. The "idols"

upon which Nietzsche here exercises the hammer of a singularly comprehensive iconoclasm are those of modern democratic civilisation.

The editor of the series is Dr. Tille, Lecturer on German Language and Literature in the University of Glasgow, and author of "Von Darwin bis Nietzsche," a book that has attracted some attention in Germany. No explanation is offered of the motives which prompted the choice of Nietzsche's latest works for the first volume of the English edition.

The history of Nietzsche's life since 1876 is the history of a tragic struggle. In that year he attended the Bayreuth festival, though in a weak state of health. The impression was overpowering, and henceforth the Wagnerian drama appeared to him in a new light. He conceived a horror of Wagner, but so deeply rooted in his affections was the Wagnerian art that with his belief in Wagner everything else that he had cared for was cast to the winds; he turned upon the religion of his childhood, the philosophy of his youth, the very land of his birth, and the only language that he really knew. Why, it may be asked, is the "Wagner Case," where the Bayreuth master figures as a "rattlesnake,"

offered to readers who have had no means of access to the earlier essay by the same writer called "Wagner in Bayreuth," an utterance of enthusiastic discipleship and probably the most discerning appreciation of Wagner ever yet published? Again, in the early essay on "Schopenhauer as Educator," one of the "Inopportune Contemplations,"

Nietzsche reckons himself among those readers of Schopenhauer who know almost from the outset that they have encountered a determining influence; and, indeed, so saturated is Nietzsche with Schopenhauer's ideas that he cannot get rid of the Schopenhauer terminology even in his later writings, where Schopenhauer has become an "old false-coiner." The expression "Wille zur Macht," an obvious modification of Schopenhauer's "Wille zum Leben," continually recurs even in Nietzsche's latest writings, and was to have formed the t.i.tle of an entire book in his projected work "The Transvaluation of all Values." The same early work contains a pa.s.sage in which Christianity is called one of the purest examples of the striving after perfection to be found in the history of mankind, while the "Antichrist," the last essay in the volume now before us, is a new and more formidable version of the Voltairian "Ecrasez l'Infame," a furious denunciation not merely of Christian dogma, but also, and more especially, of the ethical principles that are the essence of the Christian system for the modern world. All these recantations thus appear with scarcely a hint of the antecedent confessions of faith. It has been denied that the mental development of Nietzsche underwent any revolution or breach of continuity in the year 1876. German disciples have attempted to prove the consistency of that development, and in the April number of the "Savoy" Magazine Mr.

Havelock Ellis remarks, with reference to Nietzsche's Polish descent, that he was "not Teuton enough to abide for ever with Wagner." But in any case the apostacy of Nietzsche from Wagner is a painful subject.

When he satirises Germany as the "flat-land" of Europe, the land of the Hyperboreans and worshippers of Woden, the G.o.d of bad weather, when he accuses the Germans of loving everything nebulous and ambiguous and hating clearness, consistency, and logic, we may remember that though Germany was the land of his birth Nietzsche was not a German by blood.

But to Wagner he had been bound by ties of personal friendship as well as by fervent artistic admiration, so that no sufficient excuse can be offered for the appalling diatribe in which he smothers with ridicule both Wagner himself and everything connected with the Wagnerian art. The plea of insanity can scarcely be allowed. There is too much method in Nietzsche's madness. Moreover, he is no vulgarian like Nordau, lecturing in a muddy pathological jargon about subjects completely over his head.

Nietzsche knew what he was talking about; if he had not first been the most enthusiastic of Wagner's disciples he could not have become so formidable an enemy. But though we may wish that on arriving at a new mental standpoint he had dealt more gently with his former friends, yet the temper which leads a writer to disregard every other consideration in sheer intentness on the truth of the matter in hand is a quality not to be slightly discounted.

That Nordau should have antic.i.p.ated Nietzsche in this country is a public calamity. The talk about Wagner's degeneracy and decadence had thus pa.s.sed into a tiresome cant, and now that the real source of the only serious anti-Wagnerian criticism makes its appearance the task of disengaging the important side of that criticism seems almost hopeless.

A few of the leading points against Wagner's works may, however, be mentioned here--the want of life in the whole and the excess of life in the small parts, the internal anarchy, the distress and torpor alternating with disturbance and chaos, the dwelling on the pathetic note till taste is overcome and resistance overthrown, the hypnotic character of Wagner's influence, his musty hierarchic perfumes, his wealth of colours and demi-tints, his mysteries of vanishing light that spoil us for other music--these are some of the characteristics of decadent art upon which the case against Wagner is based, and it is impossible to deny either the acuteness of Nietzsche's observation or the damaging character of his indictment. On the other hand, it must be remembered that the renovation of musical drama under Wagner's influence is an unquestionable fact. Wagner saved us from the period when operas were concocted from point to point by the most distinguished composer of the day with a view to the tastes of the Parisian Jockey Club. Wagner brought back dignity and poetry; he brought back sincerity, he infused a strain of powerful and far-reaching vitality into the art that he practised. The enthusiasm of the Wagnerian renascence absorbed nearly all that was commanding in the musical talent of the time; it affected even the Italian school, which had hitherto pursued an absolutely independent line of development. Admitting, therefore, that Nietzsche is often right in detail, just as Voltaire is now and then right when he finds fault with "Hamlet," we are disposed to reject Nietzsche's general conclusion no less emphatically than Voltaire's description of Shakspere as a drunken savage. The truth is that decadence or decline in one principle of vitality often means awakening energy in another. Nietzsche had latterly worked himself to a point of view from which the mystery of northern poetry and the vividly imaginative detail of Gothic art are intolerable. His remarks about Wagner's want of taste in the disposition of broad ma.s.ses and his over-liveliness in minute detail are like a criticism of Strasburg Cathedral by an ancient architect; his view of the Wagnerian drama as concerned with problems of hysteria and as exhibiting a gallery of morbid personages is like an indictment by a Roman patrician of the entire "Corpus Poetic.u.m Boreale." Nietzsche was all his life a stranger to tolerance and compromise, and towards the end this peculiarity became greatly accentuated. His failing health attracted him to southern climates, and he presently decreed that the north was no longer to exist. Having found a sort of salvation among the "Halcyonians," he is constrained to wage spiritual warfare against all Hyperboreans, and especially against Wagner, regarded as the typical Hyperborean. "Ah, the old Minotaur!" says Nietzsche, "What has he not cost us already! Every year trains of the finest youths and maidens are led into his labyrinth to be devoured. Every year all Europe strikes up the cry: 'Off to Crete! Off to Crete!'" It is highly interesting to observe where Nietzsche finds an antidote for the painful impression of the Wagnerian art. The one modern work that thoroughly satisfied his later taste was Bizet's "Carmen." "This music seems to me perfect," he says; "it approaches lightly, nimbly, and with courtesy. It is rich and precise. It builds, organises, completes, and is thus the ant.i.thesis of that polypus in music which Wagner calls unending melody. It has the subtlety of a race, not of an individual. It is free from grimace and imposture. I become a better man," says Nietzsche, "when this Bizet exhorts me. Such music sets the spirit free. It gives wings to thought.

With Bizet's work one takes leave of the humid north and all the steam of the Wagnerian ideal." "Carmen" is only the music of devil-may-care, of gaiety and sunburnt mirth, with a strong spice of southern pa.s.sion; but it has really vivid originality, it has true unity of style, and the unerring perfection with which the composer has caught and reflected a certain mood of wayward grace and mastered the musical symbolism of the bright and fierce and fickle south, the lightness and fire, the logical development and rhythmical charm of the music stamp the work as an unmistakable masterpiece of its kind. In his delight at finding something congenial to his later taste Nietzsche forgot the question of scope, and forgot that Bizet was only a trifler. It was enough for him that he had found a "Halcyonian" to contrast with Wagner, the "Hyperborean." Another objection to the line taken in the introduction is that the isolated insistence on Nietzsche's "physiological" standard gives the impression of a type of thinker inconceivably remote from what he really was. Many a dull and stodgy materialist, such as the author of "Kraft und Stoff," has maintained the universality of the physiological standard; while the special characteristic of Nietzsche's ethical ideas is surely something very different. Is it not the audacious denial that any one ethical system is valid for all cla.s.ses of mankind?--the theory of "Herrenmoral" and "Sklavenmoral,"

master-morality and slave-morality--and the attribution of all social mischief to the ever-increasing prevalence of slave-morality over master-morality. Is it not the acceptance of the caste-system as the simple recognition of a universal and unchanging fact of life which really differentiates Nietzsche both from the English moralists and from all other European writers whatsoever? Perhaps Dr. Tille was unwilling to alarm his readers, and conscious of addressing a public which regards the question of human equality as having been finally settled a hundred years ago, deliberately avoided bringing forward opinions that savour of Oriental despotism. But seeing that every line of Nietzsche's writings is animated by such opinions, it is impossible to deal with the subject at all without shocking the ideas of a democratic age. Nietzsche, it should be remembered, was a belated scion of the proudest, most turbulent, and most ruthlessly tyrannical aristocracy that ever existed.

He witnessed, with despairing rage, both the success of vulgarity in that modern Europe which had ruined his ancient and n.o.ble race, and what he regarded as the progressive depreciation of the high-bred qualities in human nature under the influence of socialistic ideas. Though nowhere expressly stated, the thought of his people, disinherited for their inability to adapt themselves to the modern spirit, is never absent from his consciousness, and he uses his matchless literary power to tell the men of an industrial and co-operative civilisation what the last of genuine aristocrats thinks of them. With advancing years Nietzsche became less and less German and more and more Polish, till after the break with Wagner and Schopenhauer we find him openly satirising everything German. He has, in fact, "reverted to type," and from 1876 onwards he figures as a feudal aristocrat in exile.

In his general type of culture Nietzsche was very un-English. The questions of aesthetics have never been treated in this country as anything but an affair of dilettantes--at best a superior kind of trifling; whereas for Nietzsche they were a matter of life and death.

And if it is a point of conscience with cultivated Englishmen to take some interest in graphic and plastic art, we have nevertheless practically excluded music from our scheme of culture. We have, perhaps, advanced a little beyond Lord Chesterfield's view of music as a pursuit leading to nothing but waste of time and bad company, and an English n.o.bleman of the present day would probably hesitate to lay down, as Lord Chesterfield laid down, that the legitimate claims of music upon the attention of a cultivated man are adequately met by the occasional giving of a penny to a fiddler. Yet in the depths of his consciousness the typical Englishman has still a tendency to regard the disputes of the musical world as Byron regarded the Handel and Buononcini controversy:--

"Strange all this difference should be 'Twixt Tweedledum and Tweedledee."

Excepting, perhaps, one or two recent cases, such as Dr. Parry and Mr.

Hadow, our men of light and leading have had nothing important to say about music, whereas for Nietzsche, a scholar and critic of commanding reputation, music was the one art possessing genuine vitality in the modern world, and the questions of musical aesthetics were anything but an affair of dilettantes; they were the questions connected with a tremendous power for good or evil.

Of all Nietzsche's fantastic conceptions that which has produced the most curious results is the famous "blonde beast," a sort of bogey invented for the purpose of annoying and frightening Socialists. The satirist begins by expressing contempt of herding creatures and admiration of "beautiful solitary beasts of prey." Sheep and cattle, he reminds the Socialists, are naturally gregarious, but lions have never been known to acquire the gregarious instinct. Next he develops the theory of a.n.a.logy between great men of the conquering type and common criminals--the same theory as is set forth, ostensibly as a joke but really with much seriousness, in Fielding's "Jonathan Wild." This theory stands in high repute among Socialists, who find it useful for attacking great men of the conquering and warfaring type, so that when Nietzsche turns it against Socialism he strikes with a two-edged sword. Lastly, he conjures up a fearsome image of predatory and unscrupulous vigour, a combination of Napoleon and feudal aristocrat. This is the "blonde beast" which, according to the programme of the Nietzschian apocalypse, is to devour the enfeebled man of the modern world. It is one of Nietzsche's happiest inspirations, and has already provoked a literature. Quite recently, for example, a book appeared in Germany accepting with perfect gravity and recommending for immediate practical adoption the principles of the "blonde beast." One might almost imagine that Nietzsche foresaw some such result with secret satisfaction at the idea of his posthumous revenge on the "flat-land." There are signs, too, in the English press that the popular imagination is about to fix on Nietzsche as a writer who recommends promiscuous ruffianism. Was not Darwin known for many years as the preposterous eccentric who said men were descended from monkeys? It is, however, advisable to warn those who are not greatly concerned with mental problems, who value tradition and take a hopeful view of life, that they had better leave Nietzsche alone.

His influence is on the whole gloomy, disquieting, and profoundly unsettling, though in relation to the critical literature of the Continent he is unquestionably one of the great originals, one of the few "voices" that find many echoes.

[Sidenote: =Nietzsche in English.=

_August 4, 1899._]

The publication of a complete English translation of the works of Nietzsche is an enterprise which deserves the cordial thankfulness of all lovers of profound thought and fine literary style. It is not too much to say that no German writer since Goethe's death, with the possible exception of Schopenhauer, has united in the same degree as Nietzsche the two characteristics of originality of matter and charm and pungency of expression. And of no modern writer whatever, except of George Meredith, can it be said that he possesses anything like Nietzsche's power of compelling his reader, whether he is an admiring reader or a protesting one, to think for himself about the fundamental problems of life and conduct. Nietzsche's philosophy, with its intense hatred of Christianity and modern humanitarianism, is scarcely likely to make any large number of converts among us, but if it can compel us to ask ourselves honestly and plainly what the unacknowledged ideals of our civilisation are, and whether they are, after all, capable of being rationally justified, he will have done an infinitely greater service to thought than any founder of sect or school.

If one measures the worth of a book by its suggestiveness rather than by the degree in which its propositions can be accepted as a whole, Nietzsche's own description of his "Thus spake Zarathustra" as the profoundest of German works will hardly appear exaggerated. In the absence of the great work on the "Transvaluation of all Values," which was so lamentably cut short by the philosopher's incurable illness, "Zarathustra" must probably be accepted as the prime doc.u.ment of the new moral code, of which Nietzsche was the best known and most eloquent preacher.

Nietzsche's hero has, of course, very little in common with the semi-historical fighting prophet of Iran. Under the disguise of a story with no particular scene or date, he gives you a treatise on the moral life as it might be if men would regard the extirpation of the unfit and the propagation of a race of physically and mentally superior beings as the first and last of human duties. Of course, in any such picture there must always be many subjective features, and much that is characteristic of Zarathustra, his extreme individualism, his love of loneliness and solitary places, his hatred of a complex and expensive life, is simply a reflection of the peculiar personal taste of his Creator. Had Nietzsche himself not been free from ordinary social and domestic ties, it is likely that the individualistic and anti-social strain in his teachings would have been far less prominent than it is. But when all allowance has been made for such personal idiosyncrasies, it remains the fact that Nietzsche has more boldly than any other writer of our time raised the most important of social questions; the question whether the ethical and political ideals of Christianity, of democracy, of universal benevolence, are those of a healthy or those of a radically diseased humanity. No future vindication of our current idea can be regarded as of any value unless it sets itself to grapple, more seriously than professional moral philosophy has as yet done, with the attack of Zarathustra. In the minor writings which fill the other two volumes of the translation already published, Nietzsche is less constructive and more purely iconoclastic. The "Antichrist" subjects the established religion of Europe and the moral code based upon it to a criticism which is always suggestive, often profound, sometimes merely angry and wrong-headed. The attack upon Wagner, in whom Nietzsche had once looked for a master, is closely connected with the furious onslaught upon Christian ideals. Of Wagner the musician Nietzsche has many things both hard and shrewd to say, but the Wagner against whom the main brunt of his polemic is directed is Wagner the psychologist, the pessimist, the preacher of chast.i.ty and resignation--in a word, as Nietzsche understands him, the decadent. Christianity, according to Nietzsche, has made decadence into a religion, Schopenhauer has turned it into a philosophy, Wagner into an aesthetic theory. Hence the constant polemic against all three which recurs in all Nietzsche's writings. The "Genealogy of Morals" is devoted to the exposition of a favourite theory of Nietzsche's, that there have always been two ant.i.thetical codes of moral values, that of "masters" and that of "slaves." "Masters" prize above everything else qualities which bespeak a superabundance of personal force, strength, beauty, wealth, long life; "slaves" set the highest store by qualities which make servitude more endurable, and in the end render revenge upon the "master" possible. Starting from this primary a.s.sumption, Nietzsche shows wonderful insight in his examination of the growth of concepts like "guilt," "sin," "bad conscience."

Transcriber's Note

Obvious typographical errors were repaired, as listed below. Other apparent inconsistencies or errors have been retained. Missing, extraneous, or incorrect punctuation has been corrected and hyphenation has been made consistent.

Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).

Text enclosed by equal signs is in bold (=bold=).

Page i, "directon" changed to "direction". (Mr. Johnstone died in 1870, and the direction of Arthur's education fell entirely upon his mother.)

Page xii, "symbolize" changed to "symbolise" for consistency. (He would have nothing to do with the attempt to symbolise and revive a civilisation that had utterly pa.s.sed away,...)

Page xii, "civilization" changed to "civilisation" for consistency. (He would have nothing to do with the attempt to symbolise and revive a civilisation that had utterly pa.s.sed away,...)

Page xli, "Nietzschean" changed to "Nietzschian" for consistency. (The review of Tille's translation, well bears partial reprinting in this volume for its keen intelligence and also as a quite early sketch of the Nietzschian system in the English press.)

Page xxvi, "nor h" changed to "north". (It lies in a well-wooded district of Podolia, some hundred miles further north than the region to which I first went.)

The absence of the sub-heading, I., in CHAPTER V has been kept true to the original.

Page 41, missing "on" added. (... a man of genius who, without private means, had thrown up his employment and taken himself and his wife on a long journey to a foreign country in order to win recognition in "la ville Lumiere" must, in the course of three fruitless years, have felt something worse than misgiving.)

Page 42, "aud" changed to "and". (... it is that bitterness of spirit which finds expression in the smashing and burning ...)

Page 58, "naively" changed to "navely" for consistency. (Besides doing justice to the drama as an allegorical picture of life in the light of certain nineteenth-century ideas, the performance was a specially good revelation of its amusing and navely entertaining qualities.)

Page 61, duplicate "which" deleted. (In regard to "Walkure" and "Siegfried," which have long been in the repertory of London, Paris, and other capitals, the superiority of Bayreuth is very much less certain--that is to say, of Bayreuth as represented by this year's performances.)

Page 80, "begining" changed to "beginning" for consistency. (The best of the music is at the beginning, where there is an extremely fine chorus, "The Challenge of Thor," containing various musical elements all truly expressive and fraught with the same primitive and racy vigour.)

Page 84, "same" changed to "some". (The striking success of this composition reminds us of the following pa.s.sage occurring at the end of an article by Sir Hubert Parry written some years ago.)

Page 122, "Frankfort" changed to "Frankfurt" for consistency. (The chief feature in the interpretation on Tuesday was the superb rendering, by Professor Hugo Becker, of Frankfurt, of the violoncello solo which throughout the work is identified with the person of the t.i.tular hero.)

Page 129, "Symphony" changed to "Symphonie" for consistency. (="Faust Symphonie," Dusseldorf.=)