Red/On Hearing What You Want When You Want It
Reflecting today in my garret, I find myself in a melancholy mood. I have searched the concert announcements in the advertising columns of my morning newspaper only to discover that I must hear—if I hear anything at all—either Beethoven's Seventh Symphony or Mozart's Symphony in G minor; either the Coriolan overture or the overture to Euryanthe; either Chabrier's Bourrée fantasque (which would be new to my ears) or Sibelius's Finlandia; and, at the Opera, I am offered Aida. Now this is a discouraging state of affairs for a man of temperament who would like to order his music as he orders his library or his dinner. One is never obliged to eat at some one else's behest, one reads according to one's fancy, but when one wants to listen to music one must perforce listen to what is being played or else not listen at all, unless—and here it is well to admit the futility of the qualification—one is Ludwig of Bavaria. This afternoon I have a whim to attend a concert, the program of which shall consist of César Franck's D minor Symphony, Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps, and Debussy's La Mer. Franck's symphony will, of course, be performed some time this winter, but the performance will fall on a day on which I have no ambition to hear it, and the other pieces will not, in all probability, be performed at all.
My temporary prejudices and tastes in music, indeed, seem ever at variance with my opportunities. For many years I longed to hear Vincent d'Indy's Istar. The idea of the music disrobing, as the goddess of the legend disrobed, awakened my curiosity, a curiosity whetted still sharper by the rhapsodies which Philip Hale and James Huneker have woven around this inverted set of variations. But even curiosity perishes with age and on the day when, finally, I saw the thing announced, I discovered, to my surprise, that all appetite had left me. Nevertheless, on this bright winter afternoon, when I should have preferred to walk in the park or even to attend a moving-picture theatre, I forced myself to enter the concert hall. The auditorium was overheated and stuffy; I was surrounded by a crowd of hysterical females who had come to see a Russian violinist, whose name, in translation, was Mike or Alec. I sat through a long program, for Istar was announced to close the concert, and when at last it was performed, I began idly When You Want it to turn over the pages of my book of notes about the music, reading the advertisements with an interest which I found I could not devote to the composition itself. That, in fact, I scarcely listened to. This is not a unique experience; it is usual. The evenings on which I yearn to hear Boris Godunoff they sing L'Amore dei Tre Re at the Opera; the afternoons on which I have a deep longing to listen to Liszt's B minor Sonata, the Hofmanns and Bauers and Myra Hesses are all busy playing Chopin's.
This is both confusing and irritating, for taste in music changes, especially if you hear a good deal of it. I have worshipped at several altars. Some of them I return to when I can. The cool, sane, classic beauty of Gluck, the gay, sweet-sour, tragi-comedy of Mozart, the red blare and poster-like dash of American jazz, the pellucid harmonies of Debussy, so like the nocturnes of Whistler, the refreshing melodies of Arthur Sullivan, are seldom unwelcome, but the days in which I enjoy the empty orchestral orgies of Richard Strauss, the trumpet blasts of Richard Wagner, the fantastic but futile inventions of Hector Berlioz, and the thunderbolts of Beethoven come more rarely. Other intermittent humours find me hankering for the ironic acidity of the quaintly perverse l'Heure Espagnole, for the bombast of Handel, whom Samuel Butler very nearly succeeded in making famous again, for Chinese music, even for Grieg's piano concerto, but seldom do mood and music strike me simultaneously.
There are hours in which the charming melancholy and faded sentimentality of Werther and Eugen Oniegin, lyric dramas curiously similar in feeling, would come as a boon. There are nights when Les Larmes, and the Letter Song in Tchaikovsky's opera, would send me sobbing from the theatre, for these airs evoke a certain artificial Victorian atmosphere of grief more potently than any book or picture with which I am familiar. When Tatjana begins the Letter Song, if you are in the mood—and how seldom this is!—the key of the play is handed into your keeping, the soul of the composition communes with your own soul, and a vague sympathy with something perhaps alien to your own nature takes possession of you.
Sometimes I am seized with a desire for the dance, a craving for a conventional rhythmic expression, for, at least, even if one cannot dance, one sometimes itches to hear dance music, but these will not be the nights on which The Beautiful Blue Danube, Coppélia, or Beethoven's Seventh Symphony will be played. Der Rosenkavalier would fill the breach, but how often can one hear Der Rosenkavalier?
I have never listened to The Barber of Seville without enjoying it, and there are times when I burn to carry Rossinian explorations farther, when I perhaps might take delight in Tancredi, with its still delicious, but now never sung, Di tanti palpiti, sacred to the memory of Giuditta Pasta, and La Cenerentola. Often, indeed, musing before the fire in my garret, I wistfully beg the gods to put it into somebody's head to play me the tunes I have read about so often, but which now I can hear only in my mind's ear through the formality of the printed scores: for example, Félicien David's Le Désert, that "ode-symphonie" which Hector Berlioz hailed as a chef-d'œuvre and which seemingly remained a chef-d'œuvre until the calmly sardonic Auber one day remarked, "I will wait until David gets off his camel." Either the epigram or the subsequent dismounting killed the piece, for now it is never played. But I should like to hear it: what could be quainter than Second Empire orientalism? Would Ingres's Odalisque come to life under the spell of David's harmonies and stand in ivory perfection in some sheik's harem, listening to the call of the muezzin, while the camels tramped the desert with their lumbering, swaying passing? What of Spontini's La Vestale? Would this faded score evoke the spirit of Rome, as Gluck's music evokes the soul of Greece? I can decorate my garret with Victorian trophies, antimacassars, walnut highboys, wall-paper representing Roman temples, beneath the columns of which shepherd boys play their pipes, while troops of ladies, garbed like Mrs. Leo Hunter, embark for Cythera on splendid barges. I can examine at my leisure mezzotints and engravings by John Martin, Richard Earlom, Valentine Green, Goltzius, Edelinck, or J. R. Smith, and I can enjoy the mellow cornfields and rich velvety forests of George Inness whenever I feel in the mood to do so, which is not too often. As frequently as I please I can take down from my shelves and dip into The Monk by M. C. Lewis, Headlong Hall by Thomas Love Peacock, The Art of Dining by Abraham Hayward, The Truth about Tristrem Varick by Edgar Saltus, or Chandos by Ouida. No strange, old-fashioned byway, no hidden cranny of painting or literature is denied me, but if I were dying of desire to experience an audition of Purcell's Dido and Æneas, Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie, Balfe's The Maid of Artois, or even Wagner's Die Feen or Puccini's Edgar, I should expire before the medicine was proffered me.
Watteau, Voltaire, Cranach, H. B. Fuller, Rodin, and Joseph Hergesheimer stand ready to please me whenever I am in the proper temper When You Want it to appreciate their work but, unless I follow Ernest Newman's example—which I am not likely to do—and purchase a player-piano, I am dependent on the whims of the Paris Opéra or Mr. Walter Damrosch for the privilege of listening to Lully, Couperin, or Grétry. Even Ernest Newman must listen to most of this music in transcriptions—transcriptions, which he admits in his laudatory book on the subject, have been made carelessly enough, for the most part, from transcriptions already fashioned for human pianists, without reference to the orchestral scores, which the player-piano, being gifted with more than two hands, could more nearly duplicate in number of voices if not in timbres—and, in relation to such music as has not yet been cut in rolls, he would stand in precisely the same position that I stand. Could he, for instance, buy a roll of Le Désert? At this very instant I would rather hear a performance of Grétry's Richard Cœur de Lion, of which an excerpt, quoted in Tchaikovsky's Pique Dame, has haunted me ever since I heard that opera, than the complete works of Giuseppe Verdi. Nay! I think I would eschew all other pleasures, even an evening at the theatre where Delysia plays, for an opportunity to attend a performance of the rewritten version of Simone Boccanegra. I might want to hear it only once, but how very much I do want to hear it once! At least I want to today. In 1926, when Gatti-Casazza at last mounts Simone Boccanegra at the Metropolitan Opera House I shall probably go to bed entirely ignorant of that fact. Curiosity and desire will be equally dead, in all likelihood, so far as Cornelius's The Barber of Bagdad, Nicolai's The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini are concerned, when the time arrives when it will be easy for me to satisfy this curiosity and desire.
The case with modern music is no better. It is just as difficult to gratify an ambition to hear Dukas's Ariane et Barbe-Bleue as it is to hear Offenbach's Barbe-Bleue. The Boston Symphony Orchestra will no doubt perform Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin on the night when I am hungry for the Rapsodie Espagnole, and Bodanzky will provide this last delight on the evening I have begged providence to send me Daphnis et Chloë. This is all assuredly music in the modern French idiom, although Erik Satie has said, "Ravel has refused the Legion of Honour, but all his music accepts it," and we know that in ten years this epigram will become a platitude. Lately, we have heard a good deal from the modern Italians, Respighi and Malipiero, but I wanted to hear them two years ago.
On the whole, it is amazing that anybody ever When You Want it acquires a taste for orchestral music or the opera at all. We are, it would seem, completely in the power of Messrs. Bodanzky, Gatti-Casazza, Stokovski, Pierre Monteux, Sargent and Milton Aborn, and Fortune Gallo. They not only determine what we shall hear, they also decide when we shall hear it. The situation is monstrous and unbearable. A few comparisons may serve to bring the point to you more forcibly. Suppose, for instance, that the directors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art issued a decree to the effect that you could see Manet's Boy with a Sword only on July 17, 1922, and not again until February 4, 1930. Suppose that these gentlemen further ordered that Renoir's portrait of Madame Charpentier would be on view only on odd Sundays during Lent. Suppose that the Greek vase room or the chamber containing Chinese porcelains was open to the public only on December 6, 1921. Let us imagine another example, even more terror-inspiring. Suppose that Messrs. Brentano, Scribner and Putnam arbitrarily made a rule that the public could only buy certain books on certain days. On January 1, Putnam's would sell only the works of Harold Bell Wright, Brentano's, only Shaw's new volume of plays, Scribner's, Joseph Hergesheimer's San Christóbal de la Habana. On January 2, one would be permitted to purchase the novels of James Branch Cabell at Putnam's, Benedetto Croce's Æsthetic at Brentano's, and Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol at Scribner's. On January 3, Putnam's would dole out a new novel by Sinclair Lewis, Brentano's would vend a book by Arthur Machen (if they could find one),[1] and Scribner's would sell Mencken's A Book of Prefaces. On January 4, I might possibly persuade Putnam's to stack the counters with The Tiger in the House, Brentano's would offer Max Beerbohm's Seven Men, and Scribner's would display The Newcomes by William Makepiece Thackeray. January 5 would be the day to buy Esther Waters at Putnam's, William Dean Howells's Heroines of Fiction at Brentano's, and Wyndham Lewis's Tarr at Scribner's. On January 6, Putnam's would sell Robert Paltock's The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, Brentano's, Donald Evans's Sonnets from the Patagonian, and Scribner's, Webster's Dictionary. Naturally, the other bookshops and the libraries would also make capricious decisions about the books of the day. This would all appear to be very strange, no doubt, and probably all of us would stop buying books, because the particular book we wanted would never be on sale on the day we wanted it, but it would be no stranger than the existing situation in the concert and opera world.
And yet, it would appear, there is no remedy. It is an unfortunate property of music that it occupies time rather than space. Concerts, therefore, must be given within certain hours, and the number of pieces that can be played during these hours—a concert that lasts over 120 minutes is too long—is strictly limited. The Metropolitan Opera House can give only one full-length opera, or not more than three short ones, in any one evening. Somebody, consequently, must make a choice, and the directors naturally choose the works which they think will appeal to the greatest number of people at the time they are played. This accounts for the fact that a symphony which perhaps has not been performed at all for several years will be announced for performance in New York by four conductors during as many weeks.
Apparently, therefore, we must put up with the inconvenience. We must listen to music when we can, where we can, and with whom we can, and not when, where, and with whom we want to. I wonder if there are others who dream of Debussy's l'Après-midi d'un faune while they are half-listening to Berlioz's Fantastic Symphony, who attend Wagner's Die Meistersinger when they would prefer to hear Gluck's Armide? If some one knows what can be done about it, I hope he will tell me.
December 30, 1920.
- ↑ Written before the Machen vogue began.