Red/On the Relative Difficulties of Depicting Heaven and Hell in Music

by Carl Van Vechten

On the Relative Difficulties of Depicting Heaven and Hell in Music

Beginning with the eighteenth century and extending down through our own time, heaven and hell have exerted a powerful sway over the imagination of the musician. It would appear, at first glance, that the most abstract of the arts could express to us more satisfactorily than poetry, painting, or sculpture the symbolism inherent in the names of these post-death kingdoms. Heaven suggests goodness, nobility, sublimity, glory, simple faith, aspiration, charity, brotherly love, and, in the minds of composers, perhaps because of the mistranslation of the names of obscure Hebrew instruments of which we have no pictorial conception, these qualities are best expressed concretely by means of harps and trumpets. Hell, on the other hand, which suggests vice, ugliness, deceit, and defeat, is generally associated with snarling bassoons and rattling drums. Curiously enough, for there can be nothing inherently wicked about music, it is with hell rather than heaven that composers generally have achieved better results; and the noblest music is not specifically concerned with paradise. The Symphony in C minor, of which it is unnecessary to name the composer, Schubert's Symphony in C major, which has only been associated with heaven through Schumann's adjectival comment, Or sai chi l'onore, and the final scene of Die Walküre were all no doubt inspired by God in the deepest religious sense, but the composers were making no attempt to picture to us the streets of pearl, the mighty chryselephantine throne, or the winged supernaturals who are said to play harps in the air. A real heaven in opera or tone-poem is quite likely to remind a musician of the key of C major, the tonic and the dominant, and the diatonic scale, whereas hell and the devil seem to insist on five or six sharps or flats, esoteric scales, and a daedal disregard for exoteric rhythms. The conclusion of the second act of Hänsel und Gretel furnishes an excellent typical example of what usually happens in music when the composer is concerned with heaven. Humperdinck here is satisfied, with the aid of transparencies, coloured lights, and statelily tripping angels^[1] bearing gilded palm leaves, to transfigure and glorify a tune which would form an appropriate part of the service at a Protestant Sunday School and which dramatically is probably quite in keeping with the Protestant Sunday School ideas of the two babes in the forest. It may be said, however, with its unimaginative succession of tonic and dominant chords and plentiful arpeggios, to represent one of the weakest moments in the score. Arpeggios, by the way, are seemingly an essential accompaniment to anything heavenly. It is not alone Little Eva who expires to them; even Richard Strauss invokes their aid for his balefully banal heaven music in his tone-poem, Death and Transfiguration, an episode which sends some of us away from the concert hall fully determined never to do any good in this world for fear we may be consigned to listen to such vapid music all our immortal lives. Heaven, indeed, must be a dull place to inspire such saccharine chords in the composer of the acescent and biting Elektra. Again, in The Legend of Joseph, an angel steps our way to a tune which suggests that Strauss is not at his best when thinking of heaven. Nor is Mascagni who, in Iris, introduces us to a Japanese paradise, via a lotus-flower route, much more successful. With the naïve simplicity of The Creation^[2] and for the thundering, God-fearing music of The Messiah I have more sympathy, and of all heavenly music I do not believe better exists than the Dance of the Angels in Wolf-Ferrari's Vita Nuova. There is a test for great art, and you may apply it equally to Paul Verlaine or to Shakespeare, in that it treats of the sublime with simplicity and of the simple with sublimity. This minuet, scored for harps, piano, and kettledrums, bringing to mind a divine fresco of pre-Raphaelite angels, of daisy-speckled green fields, of deep blue skies reflected in lakes of still deeper blue, circled by ilexes and cypresses, is indeed celestial in its simplicity, as poignant a simplicity as that of one of the poems of Sagesse. It suggests the simple faith of its composer and it begets faith in its listeners. There is gnosis in this music. Gluck, too, knew the secret; Gluck, above all others, knew the secret, but Gluck was inspired by the pagan heaven of the Greeks, a more æsthetic idealization than the heaven of the Christians. In all opera I cannot recall a more simple, a more touchingly serene page, than the music of the scene of the Elysian Fields in Orfeo. The first and unbelievably lovely dance of the happy spirits in F major, "which," Vernon Lee assures us in one of the most mood-compelling of her essays,^[3] "seems, in its even flow, to carry the soul, upon some reedy, willowy stream, into the heart of the land of the happy dead," is immediately pursued by an exquisite flute melody to which, if we are not disturbed by the action on the stage (and it is often well to cover one's eyes) we may fancy the filmiest of sylphs floating lazily through the ether. The song of the Happy Shade enhances this mood of enchantment and even the entrance of Orpheus does not break the spell, which continues to hold us in its power until the descending curtain shuts from our ears the divine chorus which closes the scene. The singing of Christian angels can never rival that of this marvellous pagan choir. The preceding scene of Furies exhibits Gluck's talent for demoniacism. How persistently they scamper and riot! How tremendous is their marmorean and terrible No! This naïve, but substantial, tonal tapestry suggests Orcagna's fresco, The Triumph of Death, in the Campo Santo at Pisa much more definitely than Liszt's Todtentanz, which is intended as a musical transmutation of the painting.

In the music of Gluck we are assuredly near the heart of true beauty which, after all, may be the real God, the actual heavenly kingdom. Ideas differ, however. In 1665, Fr. Arnoulx, Canon of the Cathedral of Riez in Provence, published at Rouen a book, now very rare, entitled Du paradis et de ses merveilles, où est amplement traicté de la félicité éternelle et de ses joyes. After describing the sights of heaven, he turns to the pleasures of the ear: "If the glory of the picture is all that one can desire, also the ear is charmed by melodious music, pleasant harmony, gentle murmurings, soft and beautiful voices. There is a director; there are singers and musicians in abundance; there are thousands of millions of beautiful voices which sing in harmony, observing very perfectly all the rules of music. The director is Jesus Christ; the singers are the angels, the blessed, happy angels. Of these there are three bands, and each of these bands, in turn, is divided into three choirs: the Cherubim, the Seraphim, and the Thrones sing soprano; the Dominations and the Principalities sing alto; the Powers and the Virtues sing tenor; the archangels and the angels in the lowest choirs sing bass; even the saints come to sing with these. Jesus Christ gives the key to all, and intones the motet, which is new. With this celestial music and so many melodious voices of different kinds there is yet, for the entire perfection of the scale, the sound of the harp, of the flute, of viols, of the spinet, of the lute, and all other kinds of instruments which marvellously tickle the delicacy of our ears."

Music of hell is usually associated with his kaisership the devil. Once even, it is related, on the authority of a composer, the devil himself wrote a tune; this is Tartini's Devil's Trill Sonata which violinists often play to this day. M. Lalande, in his Voyage d'un François en Italie, tells the story, which he avers he had directly from Tartini, and Dr. Burney repeats it. Michael Kelly informs us, in an autobiography not entirely to be relied upon in other respects, that Nardini, a pupil of Tartini, assured him that the tale was correct in every detail. One night in the year 1713, it appears, Tartini dreamed that he had made a contract with the devil, who promised to be at his service on all occasions; indeed, in the dream, the musician's new servant anticipated all his wishes and fully satisfied his desires. Ultimately, the two became so familiar that Tartini presented the fiend with his violin in order to ascertain what kind of musician he was; when, to Tartini's astonishment, he heard the evil one play an air, so beautiful in itself and performed with such taste and skill that it surpassed all the music he had ever heard before in his life. Tartini awoke in a state of feverish excitement and delight, and seized his fiddle in the hope of reproducing the music he had just heard, but the arch fiend had departed and his music with him! Nevertheless, Tartini sought pen and music-paper and immediately composed the sonata which bears the devil's name. It is the best of Tartini's works, but so far inferior has its composer declared it to be to the music which he heard in his dream that he said he would have smashed his instrument and abandoned the art for the remainder of his life could he have subsisted by any other means.

It was thoughtful of the devil to improvise his sonata in the style of the eighteenth century. What if it had occurred to him to dash off Leo Ornstein's Opus 31? Could Tartini have remembered the notes and set them down? I doubt it. As it is, we have Tartini's word for the fact that the music as performed was infinitely more extraordinary than his transcription of it. Memory is treacherous at best, and to remember a whole sonata, taking in at the same time the virtuosity of the devil and the glamour of his presence, which must have shared interest with his playing, must be adjudged a remarkable feat. Broad, sweeping, sensuous melodies, and rapid, dashing cascades of notes, to be played with devilish abandon, alternate in this music. If Tolstoy had been more familiar with musical literature he might have found this composition more to his purpose than the harmless Kreutzer Sonata. In one section the leading notes are trilled and in the cadenza the violinist is offered an opportunity to trill to his heart's content: hence probably the title. The work is difficult and we are forced to the conclusion that the devil must have been an exceptionally fine fiddler.

Philip Hale assures us, as a matter of fact, that when the devil played the fiddle his bowing was so vigorous that the dancers kept on dancing until they died. Miss Jeannette d'Abadie saw Mrs. Martibalsarena dance with four frogs at the same time at a Sabbat personally conducted by Satan, who played in an amazingly wild fashion. His favourite instrument was the fiddle, but he occasionally performed on the bagpipe. The good monk Abraham à Sancta-Clara, according to Mr. Hale, once meditated on the devil's taste in musical instruments: "Does he prefer the harp? Surely not, for it was by the harp that he was driven from the body of Saul. A trumpet? No, for the brilliant tones of the trumpet have many times dispersed the enemies of the Lord. A tambourine? Ah, no, for Miriam, the sister of Aaron, after Pharaoh and his host were drowned in the Red Sea, took a tambourine in her hand and with all the women about her praised and thanked God. A fiddle? No, indeed, for with a fiddle an angel rejoiced the heart of St. Francis. I do not wish to abuse the patience of the reader, and so I say that nothing is more agreeable to Satan for accompaniment to the dance than the ancient pagan lyre."

In 1858–59, Liszt composed two orchestral paraphrases of episodes from the Faust of Nicolaus Lenau, and in the second of these, The Dance in the Village Tavern, more commonly known as the Mephisto Waltz, the devil plays the violin, while Faust, in sensual excitement, prances away with a black-eyed peasant girl. John Sullivan Dwight, once a prominent Boston critic, held that this music was "positively devilish, simply diabolical . . . it shuts out every ray of light and heaven, from whence music sprang." Perhaps the spirit of ataraxy is in the air; at any rate, today we can listen to this piece without trembling.

Rubinstein's orchestral poem, Faust, seems to lack any reference to the devil, but in his opera. The Demon, which until recently, at least, has remained popular in Russia, he drew a full length portrait of the tempter.^[4] There are minor glimpses of hell in Der Freischütz and Robert, le Diable; in Grisélidis, Massenet turned his attention to a bourgeois, boisterous, Gothic, gargoyle kind of devil, which he has limned with no little humour. The most important air of this amusing apparition is called Loin de sa femme! Another comedy devil is to be encountered in Tchaikovsky's charming opera, Vakoola, The Smith.^[5] Charles Martin Loeffler, the Alsatian composer who resides in Boston or thereabouts, has written The Devil's Villanelle, a tone-poem after Maurice Rollinat's Villanelle du Diable. The music follows the verse line by line, word by word, while the two refrains, Hell's a burning, burning, burning, and The Devil, prowling, runs about, both have their themes. The word crapule suggests Aristide Bruant's celebrated ditty A la Villette (often sung inimitably by Yvette Guilbert) to Mr. Loeffler, and he quotes from it. To decorate the word magister he involves the Ça Ira and La Carmagnole in a contrapuntal fracas. Death plays the fiddle in Saint-Saëns's tone-poem, La Danse Macabre, while skeletons click bones and bound about. There is surely some devilry in this business. At least one American composer, Henry Hadley, has done his bit for the devil. His work is a tone-poem, Lucifer, after Vondel's five-act tragedy. The music purports to describe the war between darkness and the powers of light, until the defeated Lucifer is cast down into chaos. The Lucifer theme has been described as "sinister, foreboding." The work has been performed in New York and Boston, but I have not heard it.

It is the Faust legend, however, which has principally encouraged composers for considerably over a century to go to hell. Many of these operas, symphonies, and overtures have disappeared and only musical dictionaries and white-haired gatherers of statistics remind us that they once existed. Even much of the incidental music composed to be performed with Goethe's tragedy has fallen into oblivion. The very names of Radziwell, Lindpaintner, Béaucourt, de Peelaert, Porphire-Désiré Hennebert, F. de Roda, Rietz, Henry Rowley Bishop, Louise Angélique Bertin, Heinrich Zoellner, Lickl, Karl Eberwein, Louis Schloesser, Eduard Lassen, and L. Gordigiani have faded away. We do remember Schumann, but who knows his Faust music, maugre Mr. Newman's earnest praise? Spohr's Faust, too, is forgotten, Spohr of whom W. H. Hadow once wrote, "His whole conception of the art is soft and voluptuous, his Heaven is a Garden of Atlantis, and even his Judgment Day is iridescent." Weber might have composed a Faust. When he was engaged to write an opera for London he was offered a choice between this subject and Oberon. He chose the latter. Beethoven, too, once contemplated the possibilities of the theme.^[6] Wagner's Eine Faustouvertüre is not performed as frequently as the prelude to Die Meistersinger, but there are probably few concert-goers who have not heard it. Felix Weingartner's incidental music for Goethe's play was performed at Weimar in 1908. More recently, a young Frenchwoman, Lili Boulanger, who died before she had achieved a style, set to music a scene from the second part of Goethe's Faust and called the result a cantata, but her devil is bedecked with Wagnerian melodies and harmonies. Liszt's Faust Symphony is certainly with us both in spirit and flesh. The third movement is devoted to Mephistopheles. Ernest Newman observes that this "section is particularly ingenious. It consists, for the most part, of a kind of burlesque upon the subjects of Faust, which are here passed, as it were, through a continuous fire of irony and ridicule. This is a far more effective way of depicting 'the spirit of denial' than making him mouth a farrago of pantomime bombast, in the manner of Boito. The being who exists, for the purposes of drama, only in antagonism to Faust, whose main activity consists only in endeavouring to frustrate every good impulse in Faust's soul, is really best dealt with, in music, not as a positive individuality, but as the embodiment of a negation—a malicious, saturnine parody of all the good that has gone to the making of Faust. The Mephistopheles is not only a piece of diabolically clever music, but the best picture we have of a character that in the hands of the average musician becomes either stupid, or vulgar, or both. As we listen to Liszt's music, we feel that we really have the Mephistopheles of Goethe's drama." Mr. Apthorp remarks, "One may suspect the composer of taking 'Ich bin der Geist der stehts verneint' for the motto of this movement," and James Huneker tells us that "in the Mephistopheles Liszt appears in his most characteristic pose—Abbé's robe tucked up, Pan's hoofs showing, and the air charged with cynical mockeries and travesties of sacred love and ideals (themes are topsy-turvied à la Berlioz)."

At the present day we often hear two Faust operas; occasionally, three. Boito, after his prologue in which Mefistofele challenges the heavenly hosts, ventures no nearer paradise than the classical Sabbath scene in which Faust meets Helena in a sort of Italianate duet. To me this is the unendurable episode of this lyric drama. The scene in which Mefistofele twirls the globe in his palm while his craven cohorts circle and chortle around him is extremely effective, but when Chaliapin appears as the spirit that denies it is a matter for doubt whether it is the Russian bass or Boito who makes the effect. Certainly. Marguerite's death in prison remains the best scene, musically speaking, in the drama. Berlioz, in his "dramatic legend," is nearest hell in the Song of the Flea, an excellent piece of sardonic ribaldry, although the ride, with its ghastly accentuated horse-hoofs beating up from the orchestra, is very wonderful. Ernest Newman thinks indeed, that Berlioz's devil is the only operatic Mephistopheles that carries conviction: "He never, even for a moment, suggests the inanely grotesque figure of the pantomime. Of malicious, saturnine devilry there is plenty in him; no one, except Liszt, could compete with Berlioz on this ground. But there is much more than this in the character. In such scenes as that on the banks of the Elbe, where he lulls Faust to sleep, there is a real suggestion of power, of dominion over ordinary things, that takes Mephistopheles out of the category of the merely theatrical and-puts him in that of the philosophical." Marguerite's glorification is a forgettable passage, just as Gounod's attempt at the translation of Marguerite is the weakest point in the score, but, as no one nowadays ever ventures to sit out an opera, it was perhaps clever of Gounod to place his heaven scene last so that only the ushers and stage-hands may hear it before they extinguish the lights in the theatre. Nevertheless, you will no doubt recall the episode, with its white-winged supernumeraries rising above the housetops to the accompaniment of arpeggios and a silly chant, not even the perfumed sanctity we have the right to demand of a modern French composer.

Faust, it seems to me, of all conceivable operatic subjects, cries out for collaborators. It is unfortunate that César Franck is dead because I think that the Belgian composer and Igor Stravinsky working together might have evolved something extraordinary. For César Franck came nearer to expressing aspiration and vague longing in his mystic music than any other composer. It is not alone the Rédemption and the Béatitudes that shine in blessed light. The D minor Symphony is to me one of the finest examples of simple sublimity to be found in all music. This haunting reticulation of tones aspires and even reaches beyond aspiration. The terrible first movement warns us of the Judgment Day and then in melting human tones forgives us our sins. The allegretto is like a graceful dance of angels, the angels of Benozzo Gozzoli, clad in robes of mulberry and lilac sewn with threads of gold and silver, their halos effulgent in a blue light, itself impregnated with golden dust, while the hautboys and harps ravish our ears and the soaring violins give ample promise of the glory of the heavenly choirs. Santa Teresa would have loved this music, music mystic and beneficent at the same time, not the mysticism tinged with chypre and verveine and essence of bergamot which makes Debussy's music a powerful stimulant to jaded nerves. César Franck could have realized the simple purity of Marguerite and he would have carried her triumphantly, gloriously, magnificently, through vague Gothic arches of tone which would have burst the boundaries of any singing theatre and transported us to Amiens or Chartres.

But Papa Franck never could have managed the hell scenes of Faust.^[7] He would have made of Abaddon a truly epicene kingdom, frequented by bardashes and catamites. No, for hell we should turn to Stravinsky, and what a dashing, erratic, spontaneous, discordant devil we might expect from him! A devil in quintuple and sextuple rhythms, a devil decked cap-à-pie with triplets in sixteenths, and figurations after the worst manner of sheol, a delightful, insinuating, firefly, marvellous fellow of a fiend, with piccolos, flutes, clarinets, hautboys, bassoons, French horns, and celestas at his beck and call, a Zamiel with nerve-wracking glissandos on the violins and deep, passionate, long-bowed, mocking viola notes at his command, a Beelzebub with a shower of shuddering octaves and a flood of discordant tenths, an Apollyon who could sing bass and tenor and a little falsetto, in fact, a regular bing-bang-boom hell of a devil in the best Russian Ballet manner!

Now a Stravinsky devil played against a César Franck heaven would create a Faust warranted to keep the oldest subscriber to the Opera awake. Even old Nietzsche, could he hear it, would be delighted with this nexus of mysticism and nervous energy, this combat of the life-force with the spirit of God!

November 18, 1918.

1. Mr. Pepys's experience with angel music in the theatre is unique and should be recorded: "Went to see the Virgin and Martyr, it is mighty pleasant; not that the play is worth much, but it is finely acted by Beck Marshall. But that which did please me beyond anything in the whole world, was the wind musique where the angel comes down; which is so sweet that it ravished me; and, indeed, in a word did wrap up my soul, so that it made me really sick, just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife, that I could think of nothing else."
2. Haydn told Griesinger, his biographer, that in one of the oldest of his symphonies the ruling idea was how God spoke with a hardened sinner, and begged him to mend his ways, but without making any impression!
3. Orpheus in Rome, in Althea.
4. Satan is also a character in Rubinstein's Paradise Lost, in which the fiend and a chorus of rebel angels are frequently heard to shriek and howl. The orchestral introduction to Part III paints the "temptation and the fall." In Sir Arthur Sullivan's The Golden Legend, Prince Henry of Hoheneck, lying sick in body and mind in his castle of Vautsberg on the Rhine, has consulted the physicians of Salerno and learned that he can only be cured by the blood of a maiden who shall, of her own free will, consent to die for his sake. Regarding the remedy as impossible, the Prince prepares to die when he is visited by Lucifer disguised as a physician. The demon tempts the Prince with alcohol, to which he yields in such measure that ultimately he is deprived of place and power and driven forth as an outcast. Then, of course, a maiden offers herself to save him, and he is cured. This happy ending is foreshadowed in the prologue, in which Lucifer makes an unsuccessful attempt to demolish the Cathedral of Strassbourg. The second act of C. Villiers Stanford's dramatic oratorio, Eden, is laid in hell, and Satan naturally plays a prominent rôle in the ensuing scene which is devoted to the fall of man. In 1921, Ludomir Rozycki's ballet, Pan Twardovski, was performed at Warsaw. In this pantomime, based on an old Polish legend, the devil is the principal mime.
5. Variously known as Oxana's Caprice and Cherevichki. This opera is based on Gogol's Christmas Eve Revels. Later, Rimsky-Korsakoff composed an opera on the same subject.
6. If Beethoven had written Faust, by Oscar Thompson; The Musical Quarterly; Vol. X, page 13.
7. When I wrote this I must have forgotten Le Chasseur Maudit.