Читать книгу Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline - Constant Lambert - Страница 12

Table of Contents

Modern music, as I have said, has not developed logically, as did the other arts. Technically speaking, the Impressionist period in music anticipates the most daring experiments in Transition, but the spirit it expresses is that of The Yellow Book, while the whole is set against the incongruous background of Edwardian prosperity, progress, and Utopianism.

The 'nineties themselves had no music properly speaking, and the writers of that period were consequently driven to desperate similes when trying to add appropriate musical touches. Poor Wilde in his search for the "curiously coloured, scarlet music" that his soul desired could find nothing better than the piano pieces of Dvořák, and Beardsley was forced to read his own subtle perversity into the ponderous arguments and Victorian scenepainting of Das Rheingold. The comparative lack of neurasthenia in the music of the nineteenth century is strikingly illustrated by the essentially heroic, 'hearty', and normal atmosphere of The Ring; the somewhat peculiar sexual relationships of the characters are in no way reflected in the score and it is not until we reach Parsifal with its erotic religiosity, its Oedipus and other complexes, that we get a foretaste of the suddenly released nerves of twentieth-century music. But the literary 'nineties did not know their Parsifal and so were forced to fall back on their fecund imagination for music of a sufficiently decadent type. Enoch Soames' famous lines:

Pale tunes irresolute,

And traceries of old sounds

Blown from a rotted flute,

Mingle with noise of cymbals rouged with rust,

are really a very good description of Debussy at his worst—though the wretched author was not destined to be consoled by this sympathetic world of sound. However much one admires Debussy there is no denying the vaguely aesthetic and 'arty' quality of much of his music—a quality that has even more in common with the English than with the French decadents. The note first struck in his early setting of Rossetti's 'Blessed Damozel' permeates his work to a greater or less degree to the end of his career.

Pelléas is the ne plus ultra of the relaxed vitality and dimly realized emotions of the aesthetic movement. The Nocturnes recall Whistler, and the innumerable pictorial pieces such as Poissons d'Or, Des Pas sur la Neige, Jardins sous la Pluie, etc. are the musical equivalent of the Japanese prints whose vogue in England owed much to Whistler's guidance. The Greek evocations of some of the preludes and of the Epigraphes Antiques belong, not to the masculine world of the Greek philosophers and tragedians, but to the feminine world of the antique-fanciers like Pierre Louys and Maurice de Guérin. Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien is the swan song of the 'nineties, recalling La Demoiselle Elue in much the way that Beardsley recalls Rossetti. The later ballet Jeux may seem a foretaste of the slap-you-on-the-back, hiking spirit of the post-war composers and of their obsession with topicality, but the dim tennis players who flit inconsequently through the garden are no more genuinely sportifs than croquet players in a fan by Conder, and it is clear that Debussy's real interest is in the atmospheric background where 'Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir'. Debussy harps back to Baudelaire, not forward to Borotra. [1]

The magnificent orchestral Images are free from any superficial 'artiness', but we do not require to be told that Debussy was an ill man when he wrote them to realize that they represent not the extrovert's enjoyment of present activity, but the introvert's half-recollected, half-imagined fantasia round action. Chabrier's valses are like Chabrier himself valsing with the utmost gusto, but Debussy's Gigues is like a Proustian synthesis of the emotion drawn from some jig danced on the Breton coast, a jig in which he himself could never genuinely take part.

The crude force of the Russian peasant tradition gives to Stravinsky's ballets a superfical vigour that seems at first sight far removed from the nervous sensibility of Debussy's stage works. But the Russian ballet itself, exquisite entertainment though it was, belonged essentially to the 'nineties. Its most fanatical adherents were usually those who, though priding themselves on their modishness, were actually fin-de-siècle characters born out of their time. The change in style observable between the pre-war and post-war Diaghileff ballets reflects the purely fashionable change in the tastes of the concentration camp of intellectuals to whom Diaghileff played up, and whom the plain or comparatively plain man meekly followed. The sailor replaced the sex appeal of the oriental slave; factories, dungarees and talc provided the glamour once sought for in fairy palaces and fastuous costumes; but the essential channel of attraction remained the same. The knowing and Firbankian Les Biches was only a natural successor to the lavish and Wildian Scheherazade.

Stravinsky's ballets, then, belong as much to the aesthetic movement as do Debussy's piano pieces. L'Oiseau de Feu and Petrushka are more entertaining to see than Wilde's fairytales are to read because they make that direct physical appeal that Wilde could only get at second hand in his particular medium, but they cannot be said to carry us any further spiritually than The Fisherman and his Soul or The Birthday of the Infanta, Le Sacre du Printemps with its sophisticated and deliberate brutality has more in common, perhaps, with post-war fashions in literature, but its sadism is the natural counterpart of the masochism of Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien. The opera Le Rossignol, an overloaded piece of chinoiserie and preciosity, plunges us back again into the aesthetic and decadent world of art which found its strongest expression in the music of a later generation. There is nothing of Andersen left under the rich arabesques of the chinoiserie any more than there is any Malory left in Beardsley's illustrations to La Morte d'Arthur. Mr. Cecil Gray has rightly described this work as a monstrous Beardsleyesque after-birth of the 'nineties, and together with Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien of Debussy and the Pierrot Lunaire of Schönberg it forms the culmination of the neurasthenia and preciosity of the impressionist or disruptive period.

The apparently coldblooded and mathematical music of Schönberg provides an even stronger and more avowed link with the 'nineties than any we get in Debussy, for while Debussy's choice of texts can be explained by the fact that they are not merely 'ninetyish in feeling, but also among the finest poems in his own language, Schönberg's choice of the watered-down decadence of Albert Giraud's verses can only be attributed to the fact that he found this Dowsonish atmosphere essentially sympathetic.

In Pierrot Lunaire the ghost of the German Lied meets the ghost of French decadence. The old faded characters from Bergamo take on new meanings in a sinister half-light:

Till Pierrot moon steals slyly in,

His face more white than sin,

Black-masked, and with cool touch lays bare

Each cherry, plum, and pear.

Then underneath the veiléd eyes

Of houses, darkness lies——

Tall houses; like a hopeless prayer

They cleave the sly dumb air.

Blind are those houses, paper-thin;

Old shadows hid therein,

With sly and crazy movements creep

Like marionettes, and weep.

The quotation is not from a poet of the 'nineties, but from a poem of Edith Sitwell's which, taking up the 'nineties where they left off, so to speak, expresses perfectly the nervous appeal of the last work in which those stock figures of the fancy-dress ball have for us any meaning.

Pierrot Lunaire, moreover, cannot be considered an isolated example of the fin-de-siècle quality in Schönberg's music. Die Glückliche Hand, with its great black cat crouching like an incubus or succubus on the hero, and its green-faced chorus peering through dark violet hangings is in the purest Edgar Allan Poe tradition, while Erwartung, with its vague hints of necrophily, brings in the Krafft-Ebbing touch (Jung at the prow and Freud at the helm) which is the twentieth century's only gift to the 'nineties. I am not suggesting for a moment that Schönberg rises no higher than the weak decadence of Giraud. There is in his music a fierce despair, an almost flamelike disgust which recalls the mood of Baudelaire's La Charogne and places it far above the watercolour morbidities of his chosen text. But at the moment I am not trying to determine the purely musical value of Schönberg's various works—I merely wish to indicate the undoubted neurasthenic strain that is symptomatic of his period, and which can be found in works like Strauss' Salome and Elektra which, musically speaking, are widely differentiated from Schönberg's in technique.

I realize that nothing fades so quickly as the average musical 'thriller', and it may seem that in accusing the Impressionist composers of neurasthenia and decadence I am taking a shortsighted view based mainly on present-day insensibility to the efforts of nineteenth-century composers to horrify and startle; but we have only to consider nineteenth-century music as a whole to realize that the occasional diabolism of Berlioz and Liszt is a comparatively isolated phenomenon. A certain ghoulishness is a natural part of the German Romantic tradition, and Liszt's Mephistophelean studies, though brilliantly convincing, are more than counterbalanced by his sentimental feelings for Gretchen. Berlioz had more of the authentic Messe Noire feeling, but the finale of the Symphonie Fantastique is, after all, in the nature of a genre piece, and although it has lost none of its uncanny power it is by no means so typical of Berlioz's work as might be supposed.

One is in no way straining facts, or distorting history to suit one's own ends by placing the musical 'nineties in the rather incongruous background of the opening years of the present century. The only problem is why this neurasthenic period should so suddenly appear in this particular art at this particular time. Some may put it down to the 'time-lag' which, until the present period, music has always shown (as for example in the seventeenth century in England, when the Elizabethan tradition extended into the Caroline period): others, wise after the event, may see in the disintegrating brutality of Elektra, Le Sacre du Printemps, and other works, a Dunne-like reflection of the brutality of the succeeding war years, similar to the moral laxity, failure to keep up appearances before the servants, and general disintegration of behaviour that invariably precedes revolutions.

There is something to be said for both these points of view, but the fundamental reason I believe to be both more simple and more technical. Horror and neurasthenia are absent from pre-Impressionist music for the simple reason that composers lacked the technical means to give as much expression to this side of their nature as was accomplished by the poets and novelists. Horror and neurasthenia in literature can be expressed without resorting to extremes of technique. They can be expressed not by style, but by statement, and even, as in Defoe, by a sort of cool ironic understatement. Poe can chill our nerves by a mere description of a situation without resorting to any eccentricity of vocabulary or distortion of language. He can convince us for example that Roderick Usher's personal variations on Weber's last waltz were strange and morbid by merely telling us so. But a composer treating the same subject could only convince us by making the waltz actually sound strange and morbid, an effect which would demand a greater break with musical tradition than was possible in Poe's day.

Classical music has little sense of horror about it, not because classical composers despised such an appeal to the nerves, but because they were unable to achieve it. Dido's lament remains as deeply moving today as when it was written—we have to make no mental adjustments to the period in order to appreciate its emotional appeal; but The Echo Dance of Furies in the same opera can only be appreciated as a hieroglyphic of the sinister—it makes no direct nervous physical appeal as does the other music in the opera. On certain occasions Purcell, the most picturesque of the pre-Romantic composers, could obtain an effect of strangeness and awe as in the amazing passage which accompanies the words: 'From your sleepy mansion rise' in The Indian Queen; but for the most part his flexible technique enabled him to express anything but the outré. The same may be said of Mozart, whose music for the statue in Don Giovanni owes its effect more to dramatic situation and contrast of colour than to anything essentially strange in the music itself.

The early nineteenth century, to which we naturally look for technical advance in this respect, presents a curious contrast between the romantic and magical subjects chosen by composers and the musical material employed in their illustration. The dawn of the Tale of Terror in literature coincides with the growth of the musical style least suited to the expression of the strange, the unearthly, and the sinister. In spite of the romantic orchestration introduced by Weber, the solid hymn-tune harmonies, the Landler rhythms, the firm basis of tonic and dominant that lie at the root of the German nineteenth-century tradition are, on the face of it, a little difficult to invest with macabre qualities. Composers like Marschner were forced to resort to a monotonous and despairing use of the chord of the diminished seventh in a vain effort to provide a suitable musical background for their dastardly English lords.

The Russian school, unhampered by the essential normality of Teutonic technique, were more successful in their depiction of the magical, though it is noticeable that both Glinka and Dargomizhky, the one in portraying the wizard Chernomor in Russlan, the other in portraying the commendador in the Stone Guest, make use of the whole-tone scale, a device which must at the time have seemed the most extreme in the vocabulary of music. It was only by such an overthrowal of traditional practice that they were able to convey an impression of strangeness and horror. Their experiments however were isolated and without successors,[2] and it was not until the coming of the harmonic and orchestral revolution that centres round Debussy that the composer found himself with a vocabulary capable of expressing the fin-de-siècle spirit that was already a commonplace in literature.

The complete break up of the traditional Teutonic technique released a new world of sound and a new world of sensation. Like a repressed character who, having at last lost his inhibitions flings himself into a debauch with a hardihood and gusto that would astonish the accustomed pagan, so the composer, suddenly conscious of his nerves, almost lost consciousness of any other faculties and concentrated in one single generation the neurasthenia of fifty years of literature. It is a little difficult, perhaps, to decide whether the impressionist composers turned to neurasthenic expression because at last a suitable technique was at hand, or whether they forged this suitable technique in an effort to express this side of their nature—ultimately it does not matter. One can say to a man: 'That egg is only cooked because the water round it was boiling', or one can say: 'You are only boiling that water in order to cook the egg', without altering the fact that a boiled egg is eventually put before you.

There is no doubt that revolutionary technique and neurasthenic expression acted as a mutual stimulus, and that the composer, led by his newly won technical freedom to the expression of the less commonplace and recognized emotions, was led thence to even more esoteric subjects requiring an even greater departure from academic uses. Moreover, the composer was drawn on at increasing speed by the fact that nothing dates so quickly as musical sensationalism. The whole-tone scale, which must have caused such a fluttering of breasts when first exploited by Debussy, is by now the merest stock-in-trade of the hack composer of the cinema. Once embarked on a course of sensationalism, the composer is forced into a descending spiral spin from which only the most experienced pilot can flatten out in time.

This extraordinary speeding up in technical experiment gives a pleasantly vertiginous quality to the Impressionist period, which distinguishes it from all other experimental periods in music; and in spite of the fact that much of their experiment leads us to a blind alley there is an exhilaration of the barricades about the Impressionist composers that imposes a certain gratitude. 'Pioneers, O Pioneers!' we feel as we listen to Iberia, Pierrot Lunaire, and Le Sacre du Printemps. To be a pioneer is not necessarily the proudest of boasts for a composer—but it is at least something to boast about. We cannot turn to the present generation and sing: 'Pasticheurs, O Pasticheurs!' with the same grateful enthusiasm.