Old Fogy Part 1

Old Fogy.

by James Huneker.

INTRODUCTION

My friend the publisher has asked me to tell you what I know about Old Fogy, whose letters aroused much curiosity and comment when they appeared from time to time in the columns of The Etude. I confess I do this rather unwillingly. When I attempted to a.s.semble my memories of the eccentric and irascible musician I found that, despite his enormous volubility and surface-frankness, the old gentleman seldom allowed us more than a peep at his personality. His was the expansive temperament, or, to employ a modern phrase, the dynamic temperament. Antiquated as were his modes of thought, he would bewilder you with an excursion into latter-day literature, and like a rift of light in a fogbank you then caught a gleam of an entirely different mentality. One day I found him reading a book by the French writer Huysmans, dealing with new art. And he confessed to me that he admired Hauptmann's _Hannele_, though he despised the same dramatist's _Weavers_. The truth is that no human being is made all of a piece; we are, mentally at least, more of a mosaic than we believe.

Let me hasten to negative the report that I was ever a pupil of Old Fogy. To be sure, I did play for him once a paraphrase of _The Maiden's Prayer_ (in double tenths by Dogowsky), but he laughed so heartily that I feared apoplexy, and soon stopped. The man really existed. There are a score of persons alive in Philadelphia today who still remember him and could call him by his name--formerly an impossible Hungarian one, with two or three syllables lopped off at the end, and for family reasons not divulged here. He a.s.sented that he was a fellow-pupil of Liszt's under the beneficent, iron rule of Carl Czerny. But he never looked his age.

Seemingly seventy, a very vital threescore-and-ten, by the way, he was as light on his feet as were his fingers on the keyboard. A linguist, speaking without a trace of foreign accent three or four tongues, he was equally fluent in all. Once launched in an argument there was no stopping him. Nor was he an agreeable opponent. Torrents and cataracts of words poured from his mouth.

He pretended to hate modern music, but, as you will note after reading his opinions, collected for the first time in this volume, he very often contradicts himself. He abused Bach, then used the _Well-tempered Clavichord_ as a weapon of offense wherewith to pound Liszt and the _Lisztianer_. He attacked Wagner and Wagnerism with inappeasable fury, but I suspect that he was secretly much impressed by several of the music-dramas, particularly _Die Meistersinger_. As for his severe criticism of metropolitan orchestras, that may be set down to provincial narrowness; certainly, he was unfair to the Philharmonic Society.

Therefore, I don't set much store on his harsh judgments of Tchaikovsky, Richard Strauss, and other composers. He insisted on the superiority of Chopin's piano music above all others; nevertheless he devoted more time to Hummel, and I can personally vouch that he adored the slightly ba.n.a.l compositions of the worthy Dussek. It is quite true that he named his little villa on the Wissahickon Creek after Dussek.

Nourished by the romantic writers of the past century, especially by Hoffmann and his fantastic _Kreisleriana_, their influence upon the writing of Old Fogy is not difficult to detect. He loved the fantastic, the bizarre, the grotesque--for the latter quality he endured the literary work of Berlioz, hating all the while his music. And this is a curious crack in his mental make-up; his admiration for the exotic in literature and his abhorrence of the same quality when it manifested itself in tone. I never entirely understood Old Fogy. In one evening he would flash out a dozen contradictory opinions. Of his sincerity I have no doubt; but he was one of those natures that are sincere only for the moment. He might fume at Schumann and call him a vanishing star, and then he would go to the piano and play the first few pages of the glorious A minor concerto most admirably. How did he play? Not in an extraordinary manner. Solidly schooled, his technical attainments were only of a respectable order; but when excited he revealed traces of a higher virtuosity than was to have been expected. I recall his series of twelve historical recitals, in which he practically explored all pianoforte literature from Alkan to Zarembski. These recitals were privately given in the presence of a few friends. Old Fogy played all the concertos, sonatas, studies and minor pieces worth while. His touch was dry, his style neat. A pianist made, not born, I should say.

He was really at his best when he unchained his fancy. His musical grotesques are a survival from the Hoffmann period, but written so as to throw an ironic light upon the artistic tendencies of our time. Need I add that he did not care for the vaporous tonal experiments of Debussy and the new school! But then he was an indifferent critic and an enthusiastic advocate.

He never played in public to my knowledge, nor within the memory of any man alive today. He was always vivacious, pugnacious, hardly sagacious.

He would sputter with rage if you suggested that he was aged enough to be called "venerable." How old was he--for he died suddenly last September at his home somewhere in southeastern Europe? I don't know.

His grandson, a man already well advanced in years, wouldn't or couldn't give me any precise information, but, considering that he was an intimate of the early Liszt, I should say that Old Fogy was born in the years 1809 or 1810. No one will ever dispute these dates, as was the case with Chopin, for Old Fogy will be soon forgotten. It is due to the pious friendship of the publisher that these opinions are bound between covers. They are the record of a stubborn, prejudiced, well-trained musician and well-read man, one who was not devoid of irony. Indeed, I believe he wrote much with his tongue in his cheek. But he was a stimulating companion, boasted a perverse funny-bone and a profound sense of the importance of being Old Fogy. And this is all I know about the man.

James Huneker.

I

OLD FOGY IS PESSIMISTIC

Once every twelve months, to be precise, as the year dies and the sap sinks in my old veins, my physical and psychologic--isn't that the new-fangled way of putting it?--barometer sinks; in sympathy with Nature I suppose. My corns ache, I get gouty, and my prejudices swell like varicose veins.

Errors! Yes, errors! The word is not polite, nor am I in a mood of politeness. I consider such phrases as the "progress of art," the "improvement of art" and "higher average of art" distinctly and harmfully misleading. I haven't the leisure just now to demonstrate these mistaken propositions, but I shall write a few sentences.

How can art improve? Is art a something, an organism capable of "growing up" into maturity? If it is, by the same token it can grow old, can become a doddering, senile thing, and finally die and be buried with all the honors due its long, useful life. It was Henrik Ibsen who said that the value of a truth lasted about fifteen years; then it rotted into error. Now, isn't all this talk of artistic improvement as fallacious as the vicious reasoning of the Norwegian dramatist? Otherwise Bach would be dead; Beethoven, middle-aged; Mozart, senile. What, instead, is the health of these three composers? Have you a gayer, blither, more youthful scapegrace writing today than Mozart? Is there a man among the moderns more virile, more pa.s.sionately earnest or n.o.ble than Beethoven?

Bach, of the three, seems the oldest; yet his _C-sharp major Prelude_ belies his years. On the contrary, the _Well-tempered Clavichord_ grows younger with time. It is the Book of Eternal Wisdom. It is the Fountain of Eternal Youth.

As a matter of cold, hard fact, it is your modern who is ancient; the ancients were younger. Consider the Greeks and their nave joy in creation! The twentieth-century man brings forth his works of art in sorrow. His music shows it. It is sad, complicated, hysterical and morbid. I shan't allude to Chopin, who was neurotic--another empty medical phrase!--or to Schumann, who carried within him the seeds of madness; or to Wagner, who was a decadent; sufficient for the purposes of my argument to mention the names of Liszt, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky and Richard Strauss. Some day when the weather is wretched, when icicles hang by the wall, and "ways be foul" and "foul is fair and fair is foul"--pardon this jumble of Shakespeare!--I shall tell you what I think of the blond madman who sets to music crazy philosophies, b.l.o.o.d.y legends, sublime tommy-rot, and his friend's poems and pictures. At this writing I have neither humor nor s.p.a.ce.

As I understand the rank and jargon of modern criticism, Berlioz is called the father of modern instrumentation. That is, he says nothing in his music, but says it magnificently. His orchestration covers a mult.i.tude of weaknesses with a flamboyant cloak of charity. [Now, here I go again; I could have just as easily written "flaming"; but I, too, must copy Berlioz!] He pins haughty, poetic, high-sounding labels to his works, and, like Charles Lamb, we sit open-mouthed at concerts trying to fill in his big sonorous frame with a picture. Your picture is not mine, and I'll swear that the young man who sits next to me with a silly chin, goggle-eyes and cocoanut-shaped head sees as in a fluttering mirror the idealized image of a strong-chinned, ox-eyed, cla.s.sic-browed youth, a mixture of Napoleon at Saint Helena and Lord Byron invoking the Alps to fall upon him. Now, I loathe such music. It makes its chief appeal to the egotism of mankind, all the time slily insinuating that it addresses the imagination. What fudge! Yes, the imagination of your own splendid _ego_ in a white vest [we called them waistcoats when I was young], driving an automobile down Walnut Street, at noon on a bright Spring Sunday. How lofty!

Let us pa.s.s to the Hungarian piano-virtuoso who posed as a composer.

That he lent money and thematic ideas to his precious son-in-law, Richard Wagner, I do not doubt. But, then, beggars must not be choosers, and Liszt gave to Wagner mighty poor stuff, musically speaking. And I fancy that Wagner liked far better the solid cash than the notes of hand! Liszt, I think, would have had nothing to say if Berlioz had not preceded him. The idea struck him, for he was a master of musical snippets, that Berlioz was too long-winded, that his symphonies were neither fish nor form. What ho! cried Master Franz, I'll give them a dose homeopathic. He did, and named his prescription a _Symphonic Poem_ or, rather, _Poeme Symphonique_, which is not quite the same thing.

Nothing tickles the vanity of the groundlings like this sort of verbal fireworks. "It leaves so much to the imagination," says the stout man with the twenty-two collar and the number six hat. It does. And the kind of imagination--Oh, Lord! Liszt, nothing daunted because he couldn't shake out an honest throw of a tune from his technical dice-box, built his music on so-called themes, claiming that in this matter he derived from Bach. Not so. Bach's themes were subjects for fugal treatment; Liszt's, for symphonic. The parallel is not fair.

Besides, Daddy Liszt had no melodic invention. Bach had. Witness his chorals, his ma.s.ses, his oratorios! But the Berlioz ball had to be kept a-rolling; the formula was too easy; so Liszt named his poems, named his notes, put dog-collars on his harmonies--and yet no one whistled after them. Is it any wonder?

Tchaikovsky studied Liszt with one eye; the other he kept on Bellini and the Italians. What might have happened if he had been one-eyed I cannot pretend to say. In love with lush, sensuous melody, attracted by the gorgeous pyrotechnical effects in Berlioz and Liszt and the pomposities of Meyerbeer, this Russian, who began study too late and being too lazy to work hard, manufactured a number of symphonic poems. To them he gave strained, fantastic names--names meaningless and pretty--and, as he was short-winded contrapuntally, he wrote his so-called instrumental poems shorter than Liszt's. He had no symphonic talent, he subst.i.tuted Italian tunes for dignified themes, and when the development section came he plastered on more sentimental melodies. His sentiment is hectic, is unhealthy, is morbid. Tchaikovsky either raves or whines like the people in a Russian novel. I think the fellow was a bit touched in the upper story; that is, I did until I heard the compositions of R. Strauss, of Munich. What misfit music for such a joyous name, a name evocative of all that is gay, refined, witty, sparkling, and spontaneous in music!

After Mozart give me Strauss--Johann, however, not Richard!

No longer the wheezings, gaspings, and short-breathed phrases of Liszt; no longer the evil sensuality, loose construction, formlessness, and drunken peasant dances of Tchaikovsky; but a blending of Wagner, Brahms, Liszt--and the cla.s.sics. Oh, Strauss, Richard, knows his business! He is a skilled writer. He has his chamber-music moments, his lyric outbursts; his early songs are sometimes singable; it is his perverse, vile orgies of orchestral music that I speak of. No sane man ever erected such a mad architectural scheme. He should be penned behind the bars of his own mad music. He has no melody. He loves ugly noises. He writes to distracting lengths; and, worst of all, his harmonies are hideous. But he doesn't forget to call his monstrosities fanciful names. If it isn't _Don Juan_, it is _Don Quixote_--have you heard the latter? [O shades of Mozart!]

This giving his so-called compositions literary t.i.tles is the plaster for our broken heads--and ear-drums. So much for your three favorite latter-day composers.

Now for my _Coda_! If the art of today has made no progress in fugue, song, sonata, symphony, quartet, oratorio, opera [who has improved on Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert? Name! name! I say], what is the use of talking about "the average of today being higher"?

How higher? You mean more people go to concerts, more people enjoy music than fifty or a hundred years ago! Do they? I doubt it. Of what use huge places of worship when the true G.o.ds of art are no longer worshiped?

Numbers prove nothing; the majority is not always in the right. I contend that there has been no great music made since the death of Beethoven; that the multiplication of orchestras, singing societies, and concerts are no true sign that genuine culture is being achieved. The tradition of the cla.s.sics is lost; we care not for the true masters.

Modern music making is a fashionable fad. People go because they think they should. There was more real musical feeling, uplifting and sincere, in the Old St. Thomaskirche in Leipsic where Bach played than in all your modern symphony and oratorio machine-made concerts. I'll return to the charge again!

Dussek Villa-on-Wissahickon, Near Manayunk, Pa.

II

OLD FOGY GOES ABROAD

Before I went to Bayreuth I had always believed that some magic spell rested upon the Franconian hills like a musical benison; some mystery of art, atmosphere, and individuality evoked by the place, the tradition, the people. How sadly I was disappointed I propose to tell you, prefacing all by remarking that in Philadelphia, dear old, dusty Philadelphia, situated near the confluence of the Delaware and Schuylkill, I have listened to better representations of the _Ring_ and _Die Meistersinger_.

It is just thirty years since I last visited Germany. Before the Franco-Prussian War there was an air of sweetness, homeliness, an old-fashioned peace in the land. The swaggering conqueror, the arrogant Berliner type of all that is unpleasant, _modern_ and insolent now overruns Germany. The ingenuousness, the _nave_ quality that made dear the art of the Fatherland, has disappeared. In its place is smartness, flippancy, cynicism, unbelief, and the critical faculty developed to the pathological point. I thought of Schubert, and sighed in the presence of all this wit and savage humor. Bayreuth is full of _doctrinaires_. They eagerly dispute Wagner's meanings, and my venerable notions of the _Ring_ were not only sneered at, but, to be quite frank with you, dissipated into thin, metaphysical smoke.

In 1869 I fancied Reinecke a decent composer, Schopenhauer remarkable, if somewhat bitter in his philosophic att.i.tude towards life. Reinecke is now a mere ghost of a ghost, a respectable memory of Leipsic, whilst Schopenhauer has been brutally elbowed out of his niche by his former follower, Nietzsche. In every _cafe_, in every summer-garden I sought I found groups of young men talking heatedly about Nietzsche, and the Over-Man, the _Uebermensch_, to be quite German. I had, in the innocence of my Wissahickon soul, supposed Schopenhauer Wagner's favorite philosopher. Mustering up my best German, somewhat worn from disuse, I gave speech to my views, after the manner of a garrulous old man who hates to be put on the shelf before he is quite disabled.

_Ach!_ but I caught it, _ach!_ but I was pulverized and left speechless by these devotees of the Hammer-philosopher, Nietzsche. I was told that Wagner was a fairly good musician, although no inventor of themes. He had evolved no new melodies, but his knowledge of harmony, above all, his _constructive_ power, were his best recommendations. As for his abilities as a dramatic poet, absurd! His metaphysics were green with age, his theories as to the syntheses of the arts silly and impracticable, while his Schopenhauerism, pessimism, and the rest sheer dead weights that were slowly but none the less surely strangling his music. When I asked how this change of heart came about, how all that I had supposed that went to the making of the Bayreuth theories was exploded moonshine, I was curtly reminded of Nietzsche.

Nietzsche again, always this confounded Nietzsche, who, mad as a hatter at Naumburg, yet contrives to hypnotize the younger generation with his crazy doctrines of force, of the great Blond Barbarian, of the Will to Destroy--infinitely more vicious than the Will to Live--and the inherent immorality of Wagner's music. I came to Bayreuth to criticize; I go away praying, praying for the mental salvation of his new expounders, praying that this poisonous nonsense will not reach us in America. But it will.

The charm of this little city is the high price charged for everything.

A stranger is "spotted" at once and he is the prey of the townspeople.

Beer, carriages, food, pictures, music, busts, books, rooms, nothing is cheap. I've been all over, saw Wagner's tomb, looked at the outside of _Wahnfried_ and the inside of the theater. I have seen Siegfried Wagner--who can't conduct one-quarter as well as our own Walter Damrosch--walking up and down the streets, a tin demi-G.o.d, a reduced octavo edition of his father bound in cheap calf. Worse still, I have heard the young man try to conduct, try to hold that mighty Bayreuth orchestra in leash, and with painful results. Not one firm, clanging chord could he extort; all were more or less arpeggioed, and as for climax--there was none.

I have sat in Sammett's garden, which was once Angermann's, famous for its company, kings, composers, poets, wits, and critics, all mingling there in discordant harmony. Now it is overrun by Cook's tourists in bicycle costumes, irreverent, chattering, idle, and foolish. Even Wagner has grown gray and the _Ring_ sounded antique to me, so strong were the disturbing influences of my environment.

The bad singing by ancient Teutons--for the most part--was to blame for this. Certainly when Walhall had succ.u.mbed to the flames and the primordial Ash-Tree sunk in the lapping waters of the treacherous Rhine, I felt that the end of the universe was at hand and it was with a sob I saw outside in the soft, summer-sky, riding gallantly in the blue, the full moon. It was the only young thing in the world at that moment, this burnt-out servant planet of ours, and I gazed at it long and fondly, for it recalled the romance of my student years, my love of Schumann's poetic music and other illusions of a vanished past. In a word, I had again surrendered to the sentimental spell of Germany, Germany by night, and with my heart full I descended from the terrace, walked slowly down the arbored avenue to Sammett's garden and there sat, mused and--smoked my Yankee pipe. I realize that I am, indeed, an old man ready for that shelf the youngsters provide for the superannuated and those who disagree with them.

I had all but forgotten the performances. They were, as I declared at the outset, far from perfect, far from satisfactory. The _Ring_ was depressing. Rosa Sucher, who visited us some years ago, was a flabby _Sieglinde_. The _Siegmund_, Herr Burgstalles, a lanky, awkward young fellow from over the hills somewhere. He was sad. Ernst Kraus, an old acquaintance, was a familiar _Siegfried_. Demeter Popovici you remember with Damrosch, also Hans Greuer. Van Rooy's _Wotan_ was supreme. It was the one pleasant memory of Bayreuth, that and the moon. Gadski was not an ideal _Eva_ in _Meistersinger_, while Demuth was an excellent _Hans Sachs_. The _Brunnhilde_ was Ellen Gulbranson, a Scandinavian. She was an heroic icicle that Wagner himself could not melt. Schumann-Heink, as _Magdalene_ in _Meistersinger_, was simply grotesque. Van Rooy's _Walther_ I missed. Hans Richter conducted my favorite of the Wagner music dramas, the touching and pathetic Nuremberg romance, and, to my surprise, went to sleep over the _tempi_. He has the technique of the conductor, but the elbow-grease was missing. He too is old, but better one aged Richter than a caveful of spry Siegfried Wagners!

I shan't bother you any more as to details. Bayreuth is full of ghosts--the very trees on the terrace whisper the names of Liszt and Wagner--but Madame Cosima is running the establishment for all there is in it financially--excuse my slang--and so Bayreuth is deteriorating. I saw her, Liszt's daughter, von Bulow, and Wagner's wife--or rather widow--and her gaunt frame, strong if angular features, gave me the sight of another ghost from the past. Ghosts, ghosts, the world is getting old and weary, and astride of it just now is the pessimist Nietzsche, who, disguised as a herculean boy, is deceiving his worshippers with the belief that he is young and a preacher of the joyful doctrines of youth. Be not deceived, he is but another veiled prophet. His mask is that of a grinning skeleton, his words are bitter with death and deceit.

I stopped over at Nuremberg and at a chamber concert heard Schubert's quintet for piano and strings, _Die Forelle_--and although I am no trout fisher, the sweet, boyish loquacity, the pure music made my heart glad and I wept.

III