Читать книгу Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline - Constant Lambert - Страница 10

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The development of music has not shown the same logical growth that we find in painting. Impressionism in music came later than in painting, and music has made up for loss of time by leaving out the post-impressionist period. There has been no Cézanne in music—it is as though one went straight from Monet to Picabia.

Impressionism, as I have said, is a term easily misused, and one may doubt the logic of its use as a musical term at all; but its association with the work of Debussy and his followers is so widespread that one may conveniently use it as a generic label for that period of disruption in music of which Debussy was the dominating figure. The word impressionism is used illogically enough to cover a picture of a cathedral by Monet that bears remarkably little resemblance to the original, and a piece by Debussy that stretches the musical medium to the utmost, in order to conjure up as strong a visual image as possible. The contradiction is nevertheless more apparent than real. The academic picture being realistic, and the academic piece of music being abstract and formal, any departure from the norm results in their losing their respective conventional qualities until eventually they meet in a sort of terrain vague of the arts.

Roughly speaking, impressionist music provides a parallel to impressionist painting in its emphasis on atmosphere and colour, and its comparative neglect of construction and formal balance. More technically speaking, the methods of the pointillist painters have something in common with the use of the orchestra as displayed in Debussy's works. While from the general and literary point of view both impressionist painters and composers display a liking for a sort of Nordic vagueness, which is sharply at variance with the clear-cut logicality of the French tradition to which they are for some reason supposed to belong. Monet, in search of suitable material, went to the fogs of London, and Debussy went to the poetic prose of Maeterlinck.

Although in his abandonment of linear continuity and symmetrical design Debussy is linked to the impressionist painters, the famous 'harmonic revolution', for which he was supposed to be responsible, has more in common with the Symbolist movement in poetry. The Symbolist poets did not invent new words, nor did Debussy—contrary to general belief—invent new chords. There are very few actual harmonic combinations in Debussy that cannot be found in Liszt; the novelty of Debussy's harmonic method consists in his using a chord as such, and not as a unit in a form of emotional and musical argument.

The ninths and elevenths and whole-tone chords that form the stock-in-trade of Debussy's early mannered style are also to be found in Liszt's Annes de Pèlerinage, but in Liszt they form a definite point of stress in a continuous line of thought, a point of stress that demands a resolution. For that reason we are apt to pass over their actual quality as pure sound. But Debussy takes a certain chord and, by leaving it unresolved, or by putting it under every note of a phrase (in a manner that dates back to Hucbald in the eleventh century), he draws our attention to this harmony as an entity in itself, with its own powers of evocation. We do not take it in our stride as we do any word in a sentence like 'the ultimate interests of the electors' or a figure in a photographic group, 'reading from left to right'. We examine it separately as we might an Egyptian hieroglyphic or Chinese ideograph.

It is not my intention in a non-technical study such as this to trace back the origins of Debussy's harmonic vocabulary to Mussorgsky, Liszt, Chabrier or Satie, to the exotic influences of the gipsy music he heard in Russia or of the Indo-Chinese music he heard at the Paris Colonial Exhibition. I merely wish to point out that Debussy's real revolution in harmony consists far more in the way he uses chords, than in the chords he uses. It is a development in harmony more far reaching than any of Liszt's or Wagner's developments of harmonic vocabulary.

By suspending a chord in space, as it were, Debussy recalls the methods of the literary Symbolists. There is nothing particularly Symbolist about a greenhouse attached to a vegetable garden with a gardener working near it; but when this greenhouse occurs, deserted and unexpected, in the middle of a forest (as in Maeterlinck's poems) it immediately arouses a different and more instinctive set of feelings, even though we might be hard put to it to analyse their precise nature.

The difficulty many people experienced on first hearing Debussy's work was not due so much as they thought to any strangeness in the sound. It was created far more by the lack of rhetorical and emotional reasoning in his music. His use of successions of the same chord, of the pentatonic and whole-tone scales and the harmonies based on them, is entirely lacking in the thrust and counterthrust methods of the German Romantics. By his overthrow of the old principles of contrasted discord and concord, of suspension and resolution, by his destruction of the key-system, Debussy puts an end to the somewhat mechanical eloquence into which the German Romantics had degenerated and which is based on these premises. The old principles of logic no longer obtain, and we are forced to listen less with our minds and more with our nerves.

The essential difference between Debussy and Wagner is summed up in the contrast between the sailors' chorus at the end of the first act of Tristan and the sailors' chorus in the third scene of Pelléas and Mélisande. We cannot listen to the chorus in Tristan with our ears alone. We do not allow its effect to sink in as pure sound. We realize all its emotional and intellectual implications, we take it in relation to the emotional climax we have just experienced and we recognize that it announces the setting of the next phase in the tragedy. The sailors' chorus in Pelléas and Mélisande has no such force as an emotional argument. The departure of this shadowy boat has no direct bearing on the emotional situation and there is strictly speaking no reason why it should come into the opera at all. The sound does not provoke an intellectual reaction like a bell calling us to church or a hooter calling us to work. It impinges on our sense like an image in a dream or some half-recognized sound in nature and evokes a vague nostalgia like a perfume whose previous associations we cannot quite recall.

The emotional reaction we get from Wagner may be compared to the direct and almost cinematic emotional appeal of a ship with the hero's sweetheart on board leaving the quay, or the departure of a troop train in time of war. The emotional reaction we get from Debussy is of the less personal and more subtle order that we get from the mere sight of an unknown ship in sail.

The complete contrast of both method and aim between Debussy's work and that of the German Romantics may be seen again if we compare the maddening repetitions in Wagner's operas with the equally maddening repetitions in Pelléas and Mélisande. The Wagnerian repetitions are a mounting and rhetorical series reminiscent of a lawyer's speech—an oratorical device whose aim is to emphasize the meaning of the argument until not even the dullest member of the jury remains unconvinced. Debussy's static repetitions do not quicken the pulse—they slacken it. Like the repetitions of an oriental priest their aim is to destroy the superficial connotations of the phrase until it appeals to the deeper instincts rather than to the reason.

I have drawn my examples from Pelléas, not because I consider it Debussy at his best—it is on the contrary one of his weakest and most mannered works—but because it is a convenient textbook of his technical reactions. Pelléas represents a phase which it was necessary for Debussy to go through before he could completely rid himself of the oppressive weight of the Teutonic romantic tradition; and it is to the force of this tradition that the excessively stylized manner of Pelléas is negatively due.

It is legitimate to suppose that Debussy's technical experiments were a means—not an end. That is to say, it is more probable that the static style and harmonic mannerisms of Pelléas are due to his attempt to create a world of half-lights and dimly realized emotions, than that he chose this subject because he felt himself unable to achieve music in another style. At the same time we can see that by his treatment of harmony as an entity in itself Debussy prepares the way for the latter-day unmotivated experiments that have been described by a sympathetic critic as 'objective investigation of aural phenomena', while in his rejection of emotional rhetoric he unconsciously prepares the way for those who would reject emotion itself and throw out the baby with the bath water.

It need hardly be said that the coldness of much of Debussy's earlier music has nothing to do with the abstraction aimed at by certain present-day composers; it is a coldness of the natural world, not of the mechanical. This coldness is the most remarkable feature of the orchestral nocturnes, a transitional work halfway between the static and symbolist manner of Pelléas and the more fully developed impressionism of La Mer. These nocturnes, as Mr. Edwin Evans has rightly pointed out, recall Whistler rather than Chopin. They are like an exquisitely wrought Mohammedan decoration in which no human form is allowed to appear. The majestic procession of clouds in Nuages is a procession of clouds—not a symbol of evanescence; the wild exhilaration of Fêtes is the exhilarating bustle of wind and rain, with nothing in it of human gaiety. The icy waves that lap the sirens' rock are disturbed by no Ulysses and his seamen.

This detached and objective attitude towards nature is even more marked in the symphonic sketches La Mer. Whereas in most works of art inspired by the sea, Vaughan Williams' Sea Symphony for example, we are given the sea as a highly picturesque background to human endeavour and human emotion, a suitable setting for introspective skippers, heroic herring fishers and intrepid explorers, La Mer is actually a picture of the sea itself, a landscape without figures, or rather a seascape without ships. There was little of Walt Whitman about Debussy, and it is significant that he chose for the cover design of this work Hokusai's famous print of the Great Wave.

This cold and detached pictorialism is by now so familiar to us as an element in music that it is worth while recalling its novelty at the time these works were written. There is no trace of it in Wagner, to whom natural phenomena were, in the main, useful adjuncts to his own emotions as expressed in his characters. The sun rises to greet Brünnhilde, the forest murmurs to soothe Siegfried, and the wind rises to bring Waltraute in its wake. A tempestuous sky merely reflects the cruder melodrama of the composer's soul.

In Pelléas Debussy overthrew, as far as possible, the old romantic rhetoric, but even so the human element was at times too strong for him, and he was forced back into the traditional methods of expression by the operatic quality of some of the situations. In La Mer even this half-human element has disappeared and from the purist's point of view it is the most finished and typical of Debussy's works—though, as I have pointed out, this lack of rhetorical emotion is by no means the same thing as abstraction. A picture does not become an abstract design because it has banished all purely literary interest. In its abandonment of formal principles, its lack of continuous melodic line, counterpoint, or development, in the accepted sense of the word, and in the pointillism of its scoring, La Mer represents the apex of Debussy's impressionist manner. Colour and atmosphere have taken the place of design and eloquence, and sounds succeed each other neither in definite continuity, nor in deliberate contrast, but with the arbitrary caprice of nature itself. There is no further development possible purely on these lines, and Debussy's many short impressionist piano pieces—notably the two books of preludes—are a splitting up of the pictorialism of La Mer into its various facets. They are charming exploitations of an already established formula.

Had Debussy died after writing La Mer he would have remained a great historical figure, who had revolutionized the technique of music in a way that no one man had ever done before; but he would hardly have been remembered as an intrinsically great composer. Many of the works written after the Nocturnes and La Mer are definitely inferior in quality, and there is no doubt that the somewhat precious enthusiasm of the 'Debussyistes' and the unaccustomed demand for his work caused him to publish in his later years certain pieces that his acute critical sense would previously have rejected; but it is the best works of his later period—notably the orchestral Images—that show Debussy's real strength as an artist.

A lesser man, having reached the technical apex represented by La Mer, would either have gone on contentedly exploiting this vein, or would have completely changed his external style. Debussy was far too sincere and too intelligent an artist to recklessly change his style, for to him musical style was not a matter of good taste and objective selection but part of his very being. He had revolted against academic technique not in a wilful and deliberate search for novelty but in an attempt to find a sincere and personal expression. The comparatively conventional lyricism of the 'juicy' middle section in the Prélude à l'Après-midi d'un Faune disappears in the Nocturnes and La Mer, not because Debussy despised lyricism but because he preferred not to be lyrical at all rather than to express anything at second hand. By throwing over the whole paraphernalia of traditional musical romanticism he undoubtedly handicapped himself for a number of years and confined himself to a somewhat narrow range of expression, but his rigid self-control was rewarded by the eventual freedom and richness of style that he achieved in the orchestral Images.

In these works, and notably in Iberia, the most extended of the three, Debussy enters into a new emotional world. It is neither the old emotional world of the artist as hero that we find in the nineteenth-century Romantics, nor is it the aesthetic and purely decorative world of Debussy's earlier works. The personality of the artist is there, but is part of its surroundings, and intrudes no more than in a work of Mozart. It is an emotional world so peculiar to music that it is difficult in any way to define it in words, though Aldous Huxley perhaps hinted at it when he wrote: 'Occasionally in certain states which may vaguely be described as mystical we have an immediate perception of an external unity embracing and embraced by our own internal unity. We feel the whole universe as a single individual mysteriously fused with ourselves.'

Such a revelation is not necessarily encouraging, and there is a curious note of nostalgia and melancholy in these three pieces, though of a completely unsentimental nature. The original title of Gigues was Gigue Triste, and Rondes de Printemps belies the lighthearted quotation that heads the score, much as Iberia belies its apparently superficial atmosphere of southern gaiety. Through his capacity for investing an apparently insignificant and lighthearted tune with an almost tragic significance, Debussy stands very close to Mozart. We find the same quality in, for example, the Siciliana that forms the finale of the D Minor quartet—a simple dance tune into which and its variations Mozart seems to have compressed the emotional experience of a lifetime.

The scraps of popular melody that occur in all three Images are not merely evocative and picturesque, they have a more profound significance. They recall the often quoted lines from Sir Thomas Browne: 'For even that vulgar and tavern musick which makes one man merry another mad strikes in me a deep fit of devotion and a profound contemplation of the First Composer. There is something in it of Divinity more than the ear discovers; it is a hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole world.' This passage, I feel, gives a clue to the significance of Debussy's best works. The world they conjure up is not a Barriesque dream world, a soothing and comforting escape from reality. It is the world around us, but seen with an intense and unique vision, and the melancholy that pervades this music is no personal complaining but the underlying melancholy of human life itself.

Technically speaking these Images display a far greater liveliness and variety of texture than the early works of Debussy. His harmonic gift has lost none of its richness but here it is subordinated to the main scheme and not developed merely for its own sake. There is nothing approaching counterpoint in the academic sense of the word, but the skilful weaving together of innumerable threads of sound represents Debussy's own solution of the contrapuntal problem, and is far removed from the mainly static and vertical quality of the Nocturnes. Similarly, in the melodic line we find that Debussy has achieved at first hand the lyricism which in his early works appears only at second hand; and although his melodies may be a little shortwinded, improvisatory, and lacking in the grande envergure of the nineteenth-century composers, they have a flexibility and force that is not to be found in the plaintive wisps of melody that float dimly through the overshadowing trees of Pelléas and Mélisande.

The orchestral Images represent, in fact, a synthesis of the various elements in music that Debussy had, in his earlier days, examined and developed separately in the interests of technical experiment. They show conclusively that Debussy's technical experiments were not the detached and empirical jugglings with sounds that they were at one time held to be, but a logical development towards complete self-realization. Though more advanced in the true sense of the word than his earlier works, they are less disruptive and revolutionary from the technical point of view. Just as Debussy ruthlessly rejected the clichés of the romantic school, so he rid himself of his own marked mannerisms when they had served his purpose (I am referring now to the major works of his later period and not to his lesser piano pieces.) The mechanical use of the whole-tone scale, and the many other devices which must have been considered so modern at the beginning of the century, find little or no place in these later orchestral works. In the best of the later piano études, in the pieces for two pianos En Blanc et Noir, the ballet Jeux and the Trio for flute, viola and harp, Debussy maintained the high standard of the orchestral Images; but he never surpassed it, and we may take these works then as the culmination of Debussy's style and the most important contribution of impressionism towards music.

Although the present study is primarily an examination of post-war musical problems, this brief sketch of Debussy's outstanding works has been necessary not only because he was intrinsically the most important artist of the pre-war period but because he is undeniably the guiding principle and unifying link behind its apparently disparate experiments. It is easy enough to recognize the influence of Debussy's impressionism on his own countrymen, whose response to his music takes the form of a fairly direct imitation of its superficial characteristics, but Debussy's real influence is infinitely more far reaching than that. Once we realize that his impressionism was not only a manner, but a method, we can see the workings of this method in music that at first sight might seem totally opposed in general atmosphere. The direct, or indirect, influence of Debussy is to be found in such outwardly differentiated works as the ballets of Stravinsky and the operas of Schönberg, the London Symphony of Vaughan Williams and the Chinese Symphony of Van Dieren, the mystical poems of Scriabin and the vivid picture postcards of Albeniz, the Bluebeard of Béla Bartók and the Bluebeard of Paul Dukas, the North Country Sketches of Delius and The Oceanides of Sibelius.

Unfortunately the influence has been not so much that of Debussy the artist as of Debussy the experimenter. Viewing his work in retrospect we can see that his experiments were a necessary and integral part of his own artistic development, an example to be followed, but not a method to be imitated. To his contemporaries, however, Debussy's experiments assumed an almost political quality as a revolt against the tradition of German romanticism, and became a convenient handbook of revolution. The scaffolding which Debussy had used in the course of building his solitary tower was admired for its own sake, seized on, broken up, and made to serve as principal prop in many a jerry-built house.