Symphonies and Their Meaning Part 6

We can let our fancy play about the score and wonderfully hit an intention of the poet. Yet that is often rather a self-flattery than a real perception. In the small touches we may lose the greater beauty.

Here, after all, is the justification of the music. If the graphic picture is added, a little, only, is gained. The main virtue of it lies in our better grasp of the musical design.

In the muted strings, straying dreamily in pairs, is a vague line of the motto,--a foreshadowing of the heroic idea, as are the soft calls of the wind with wooing harp a first vision of delight.

[Music: _Allegro moderato_ (Strings)]

Now begins the main song in st.u.r.dy course of unmuted strings. The wood soon join in the rehearsing. But it is not all easy deciphering. The song wanders in gently agitated strings while the horns hold a solemn phrase that but faintly resembles the motto.[A] Lesser phrases play about the bigger in rising flight of aspiration, crowned at the height with a ray of glad light.

[Footnote A: It is well to resist the vain search for a transnotation of the story. And here we see a virtue of Saint-Saens himself, a national trait of poise that saved him from losing the music in the picture. His symphonic poems must be enjoyed in a kind of musical revery upon the poetic subject. He disdained the rude graphic stroke, and used dramatic means only where a musical charm was commingled.]

As the dream sinks slowly away, the stern motto is buried in quick flashes of the tempting call. These are mere visions; now comes the scene itself of temptation.

To ripples of harp the reed sings enchantingly in swaying rhythm; other groups in new surprise of

[Music: (Flutes, oboe, clarinets and harp)]

scene usurp the melody with the languishing answer, until one Siren breaks into an impa.s.sioned burst, while her sisters hold the dance.

Straight upon her vanished echoes shrieks the shrill pipe of war, with trembling drum. We hear a yearning sigh of the Siren strain before it is swept away in the tide and tumult of strife. Beneath the whirl and motion, the flash and crash of arms, we have glimpses of the heroic figure.

Here is a strange lay in the fierce chorus of battle-cries: the Siren song in bright insistence, changed to the rushing pace of war.

The scene ends in a crash. Loud sings a solemn phrase; do we catch an edge of wistful regret? Now returns the st.u.r.dy course of the main heroic melody; only it is slower (_Andante sostenuto_), and the high stress of cadence is solemnly impa.s.sioned.

As if to atone for the slower pace, the theme strikes into a lively fugue, with trembling strings (_Allegro animato_).

There is an air of achievement in the relentless progress and the insistent recurrence of the masterful motive. An episode there is of mere striving and straining, before the theme resumes its vehement attack, followed by l.u.s.ty echoes all about as of an army of heroes.

There is the breath of battle in the rumbling ba.s.ses and the shaking, quivering bra.s.s.

At last the plain song resounds in simple lines of ringing bra.s.s, led by the high bugle.[A]

[Footnote A: Saint-Saens employs besides the usual 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones and tuba, a small bugle (in B-flat) and 2 cornets.]

Yet the struggle, the inner combat, is not over. At the very moment of triumph sings on high over purling harp the mastering strain of Sirens, is buried beneath martial clash and emerges with its enchantment. But here the virile mood and motive gains the victory and strides on to final scene.

We remember how Hercules built and ascended his own funeral pyre. In midst of quivering strings, with dashing harp and shrieking wood, a roll of drum and a clang of bra.s.s sounds the solemn chant of the trombone, descending in relentless steps. As the lowest is reached, there comes a spring of freedom in the pulsing figures, like the winging of a spirit, and a final acclaim in a brief line of the legend.

_OMPHALE'S SPINNING WHEEL_

Between t.i.tle and score is this _Notice_:

"The subject of this symphonic poem is feminine witchery, the triumphant struggle of weakness. The spinning wheel is a mere pretext, chosen from the point of view of rhythm and the general atmosphere of the piece.

"Those persons who might be interested in a study of the details of the picture, will see ... the hero groaning in the toils which he cannot break, and ... Omphale mocking the vain efforts of Hercules."

The versions of the story differ slightly. After the fulfilment of his twelve labors Hercules is ordered by the oracle to a period of three years' service to expiate the killing of the son of King Eurytus in a fit of madness. Hermes placed him in the household of Omphale, queen of Lydia, widow of Tmolus. Hercules is degraded to female drudgery, is clothed in soft raiment and set to spin wool, while the queen a.s.sumes the lion skin and club.

In another version he was sold as slave to Omphale, who restored him to freedom. Their pa.s.sion was mutual. The story has a likeness to a similar episode of Achilles.

The spinning-wheel begins _Andante_ in muted strings alternating with flutes and gradually hurries into a lively motion. Here the horn accents the spinning, while another thread (of higher wood) runs through the graceful woof. A chain of alluring harmonies preludes the ensnaring song, mainly of woodwind above the humming strings, with soft dotting of the harmony by the horns. The violins, to be sure, often enforce the melody.

[Music: _Andantino_ (Fl. and muted violins) _Grazioso_ (Strings, muted)]

In the second verse, with fuller chorus, the harp adds its touches to the harmony of the horns, with lightest tap of tonal drum. Later a single note of the trumpet is answered by a silvery laugh in the wood.

Between the verses proceeds the luscious chain of harmonies, as with the turning of the wheel.

Now with the heavily expressive tones of low, unmuted strings and the sonorous ba.s.ses of reed and bra.s.s (together with a low roll of drum and soft clash of cymbals) an heroic air sings in low strings and bra.s.s, to meet at each period a shower of notes from the harp. The song grows intense with the

[Music: (Wood and _trem._ violins doubled above) (Horns) _espress. e pesante_ (Cellos, ba.s.ses, ba.s.soons and trombone, doubled below)]

added clang of trumpets and roll of drums,--only to succ.u.mb to the more eager attack of the siren chorus. At last the full effort of strength battling vainly with weakness reaches a single heroic height and sinks away with dull throbs.

In soothing answer falls the caressing song of the high reed in the phrase of the heroic strain, lightly, quickly and, it seems, mockingly aimed. In gently railing triumph returns the pretty song of the wheel, with a new buoyant spring. Drums and martial bra.s.s yield to the laughing flutes, the cooing horns and the soft rippling harp with murmuring strings, to return like captives in the train at the height of the gaiety.

CHAPTER VII

CeSAR FRANCK

The new French school of symphony that broke upon the world in the latter part of the nineteenth century had its pioneer and true leader in Cesar Franck.[A] It was he who gave it a stamp and a tradition.

[Footnote A: If language and a.s.sociation, as against the place of birth, may define nationality, we have in Cesar Franck another worthy expression of French art in the symphony. He was born at Liege in 1822; he died in 1890.]

The novelty of his style, together with the lateness of his acclaim (of which it was the probable cause), have marked him as more modern than others who were born long after him.

The works of Franck, in other lines of oratorio and chamber music, show a clear personality, quite apart from a prevailing modern spirit. A certain charm of settled melancholy seems to inhere in his wonted style.

A mystic is Franck in his dominant moods, with a special sense and power for subtle harmonic process, ever groping in a spiritual discontent with defined tonality.

A glance at the detail of his art discloses Franck as one of the main harmonists of his age, with Wagner and Grieg. Only, his harmonic manner was blended if not balanced by a stronger, sounder counterpoint than either of the others. But with all the originality of his style we cannot escape a sense of the stereotype, that indeed inheres in all music that depends mainly on an harmonic process. His harmonic ideas, that often seem inconsequential, in the main merely surprise rather than move or please. The enharmonic principle is almost too predominant,--an element that ought never to be more than occasional. For it is founded not upon ideal, natural harmony, but upon a conventional compromise, an expedient compelled by the limitation of instruments. This over-stress appears far stronger in the music of Franck's followers, above all in their frequent use of the whole tone "scale" which can have no other _rationale_ than a violent extension of the enharmonic principle.[A]

With a certain quality of kaleidoscope, there is besides (in the harmonic manner of Cesar Franck) an infinitesimal kind of progress in smallest steps. It is a dangerous form of ingenuity, to which the French are perhaps most p.r.o.ne,--an originality mainly in details.

[Footnote A: Absolute harmony would count many more than the semitones of which our music takes cognizance. For purpose of convenience on the keyboard the semitonal raising of one note is merged in the lowering of the next higher degree in the scale. However charming for occasional surprise may be such a subst.i.tution, a continuous, pervading use cannot but destroy the essential beauty of harmony and the clear sense of tonality; moreover it is mechanical in process, devoid of poetic fancy, purely chaotic in effect. There is ever a danger of confusing the novel in art with new beauty.]

And yet we must praise in the French master a wonderful workmanship and a profound sincerity of sentiment. He shows probably the highest point to which a style that is mainly harmonic may rise. But when he employs his broader mastery of tonal architecture, he attains a rare height of lofty feeling, with reaches of true dramatic pa.s.sion.

The effect, to be sure, of his special manner is somewhat to dilute the temper of his art, and to depress the humor. It is thus that the pervading melancholy almost compels the absence of a "slow movement" in his symphony. And so we feel in all his larger works for instruments a suddenness of recoil in the Finale.

One can see in Franck, in a.n.a.logy with his German contemporaries, an etherealized kind of "Tristan and Isolde,"--a "Paolo and Francesca" in a world of shades. Compared with his followers the quality of stereotype in Franck is merely general; there is no excessive use of one device.

A baffling element in viewing the art of Franck is his remoteness of spirit, the strangeness of his temper. He lacked the joyous spring that is a dominant note in the cla.s.sic period. Nor on the other hand did his music breathe the pessimism and naturalism that came with the last rebound of Romantic reaction. Rather was his vein one of high spiritual absorption--not so much in recoil, as merely apart from the world in a kind of pious seclusion. Perhaps his main point of view was the church-organ. He seems a religious prophet in a non-religious age. With his immediate disciples he was a leader in the manner of his art, rather than in the temper of his poetry.

_SYMPHONY IN D MINOR_