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WE now come to an offshoot of Romanticism which has survived both the intellectualisation of music and the modern attempts at new forms.
All art is rooted in the folk, but with time outgrows their primitive lore. As music is exploited and made public, it tends naturally to break away from its origins. In the glare of world competition and criticism, music of a local or provincial type dies off, but not without throwing up unobtrusive shoots which proclaim the relationship between the folk-tune and the higher developments of musical art.
Meanwhile the marvels of musical culture are becoming more and more accessible. Organisation has made it possible, by means of large numbers united in orchestra and chorus, to illustrate with increasing perfection the great musical forms, and there has arisen a new attitude in spectators and audiences, a new relationship between performers and public. Art is no longer of the folk, but it has become popular, its popularity dwelling in a true community of spirit between givers and receivers.
At a time when the higher forms of instrumental music are becoming popular, there appears that offshoot of the Romantic movement mentioned above. Folk-music, hitherto cut off from the main body of musical culture, seems to have become suddenly vocal, demanding a share in the privileges of organisation which determine for good or ill the fate of a modern work of art. We hear on all sides of the upward strivings of Northern, Slavonic, Hungarian, Bohemian and even non-European types. Musicians, and others who are something less, invite the racial spirit, hitherto dwelling modestly in song and dance, to fill the wider sphere of the symphony. Grieg, Dvořák, Smetana, Tchaikovsky, are each and all intent on coupling their national music with the great European stream, on making it universally acceptable. The world regards their attempts with both wonder and hope. Strangeness of harmony, of rhythm and time, are stimulating to somewhat blasé tastes, and suggest, even to intellectuals, possibilities of something new in music. Each composer has a characteristic palette, the Northerner's vaguely mournful, the Slav's between extremes of tumult and collapse, the Bohemian's troubled and stormy, with an ever-present visionary background of the land which bore him and left its impress upon him. Such music satisfies in its hearers, to whom it transfers its own visions, the eternal human longing for a land that is very far off; the charm of the winds of the world blows through it.
The high hopes which greeted this type of music are unlikely to be fulfilled. The more provincial, individual and brightlycoloured it is, the less likely is it to form a constructive element in the development of musical composition. Certain races have long contributed a share to that end. The Danes, never rich in local colour, have exchanged any individuality they may once have possessed for a classical Mendelssohnian manner. The music of the Hungarians, or perhaps rather of the gypsies who dwell among them, is wild, melancholy, aboriginal, but the cosmopolitan Liszt who investigated and in his writings acclaimed Magyar music, echoed it in his own work only in the form of rhapsodies and in loosely-constructed fantasies of a virtuoso type. Apart from this, even in Haydn's time, Magyar music showed itself capable of refreshing departures in rhythm and harmony; yet it has never produced anything great or original. The question before us is this. Can regional music, now claiming a place in progressive musical culture, arrest the disintegration of the sonata-form, or render it compatible with the modern outlook? The first is an impossibility, as we shall see; but the second may be brought about under certain conditions.
Peculiarity of harmony and rhythm, both of which are very closely interlocked, leads inevitably away from polyphony towards homophony. This tendency is bound to become more and more marked. Melody, in clear-cut rhythmical shape, is supported on a background of new and fascinating colour; but these unfamiliar chords stand in the way of the elaboration of structural polyphony as it existed in the motif-development of the classical sonata. This is frequently apparent in music of the regional type, which, outwardly reconciled with the great forms of instrumental music, yet remains inwardly bounded by the small forms, songs and dances, whence it arose.
Music of this type lacks sophistication, and it is useless to expect it to arrest the decay of the sonata. What value it has, lies in its fresh naturalness; what harmonic surprises it offers in the guise of attractive tunes, arise in natural sensuousness and delight in colour; the place of sensibility is taken by overflowing high spirits. It is, however, just these qualities which Chopin contributed to the new developments in music. His drowsy harmonies, his twilight pitch, despite a certain drawing-room atmosphere, gave rise to the enharmonic devices, the substitutions, which were to permeate music like a sweet poison and also carry it on to a new stage. Chopin mingled the spirit of Poland with that of cosmopolitan France, but he never succeeded in blending them absolutely. For a long time, Chopin was the only composer of the national type who followed the way of the new music.
Many Russians and Bohemians aspire to a share in Western symphonic and chamber music. The Bohemians have always been the most naturally musical people in Europe, song and dance being the bases of their musical forms, strings and voices the instruments through which they found perfectly adequate expression. While it is true that in the past the great instrumental forms of music were developed from the dance, it is also true that it is now too late in the day to graft a wilding branch on the highly-cultivated stock of modern music. Primitive art is a pleasant diversion for the overburdened soul of Europe, but cannot free it from the weight of the past, nor help in the quest for new forms. Dvořák and Smetana added an element of pure entertainment to the modern concert-programme by providing symphonic and chamber music in a more natural, less intellectual form, substituting, in fact, the suite for the symphony. Dvořák, attracted by the Neo-German movement, attempted the "symphonic poem" in Wagnerian style, but in so doing lost his freshness and charm without achieving the intellectual. Smetana, on the other hand, in the Ferkaufte Braut (Bartered Bride), not only attempted but succeeded most delightfully in a combination of Bohemianism and Mozart, expressing unspoiled nature to perfection. Dalibor, designed to be a typically Bohemian opera, is a disconnected and hybrid piece of work, and it is clear enough that Bohemian national music can be nothing more than a pleasant interlude in the wider music of the world. Programme-music and modernism stand in the way.
The Russian composer is for the most part an amateur. There is no general and widespread culture in which he can find natural growth. A soldier or an engineer sets out to construct a national music on the grand scale. The very nature of the Russians and their inborn musical susceptibility lay them open to every musical influence from German symphony to French and Italian opera. French culture of the salons has spread itself from the Court and upper circles of society over all Russian art, and the famous Court Ballet is a magical compound of passionate love of the dance and unexampled natural aptitude with traditional French forms. Russian minor key, Byzantine stiffness, Oriental sensuousness and love of pageantry, half-Asiatic rhythms, delight in sweet sound, the lethargy of generations--these are the elements of Russian music. The many races of Russia contribute an almost inexhaustible supply of folk-songs; and Russia herself now reaches out hands to Europe.
The most European of Russian composers is Tchaikovsky, not by virtue of intellect, for his natural musical gift was never modified by any influence more violent than Schumann and French perfumery. His opera, Eugen Onegin, is a more faithful reflection of the Russian spirit than The Queen of Spades. He scarcely knows the meaning of intellectual construction, and the principle of the motiv, developed through decades of cultivation, does not exist in his work. He constructs at haphazard and not of necessity. He has none of the absolute quality of that true Russian and self-lacerator, Dostoievsky. The cries forced from Tchaikovsky by his milder forms of self-torment are frequent, but not very harrowing. The famous Pathetic Symphony is probably about the deepest expression we have of this condition of soul; charming, full of fancy, full of colour and rhythm, it is in no sense a modern work, but has, nevertheless, distinct value.
Certain true Russians, determined to have done with dilettantism, and to develop the artistic side of the race, grouped themselves about Balakiref, a great pianist and acute critic with a strong disciplinary influence over his followers. Cesar Cui, Borodin, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakof, who is the first thoroughly-accomplished exponent of the Russian spirit in music, all experienced the charm of his personality. Yet of these disciples, Mussorgsky, long dead as he is, will exercise the greatest influence on the music of the future. The Russian spirit is none the less original for being highly receptive. The ambition of the Russian to play a part in world music is hampered by no tradition; he eagerly adopts European musical science, translating it into his own idiom. His introspective nature, even his national alcoholism, has led to new discoveries in music; and he was spiritually in touch with, if not in advance of, the most modern musical development, even before the tours of able conductors had made German and other instrumental music familiar to Russian audiences. Dargomijsky and Mussorgsky are among the prophets which Russia has given to the world. They patiently await the recognition which will surely come.
Scandinavia has not played a distinguished part in the contest. In Norway, Grieg is very limited, while Sinding practises the great musical forms at the sacrifice of a national manner. Sweden has its Sj6gren, but is behind in technique. There is apparent an almost universal attempt to find a short cut to musical culture, Germany remaining both model and preceptor. It is, however, too late in the day to hope, even by the most intensive cultivation, to develop a musical sense in a people organically. The natural backwardness of the North is a reflection of its climate and landscape; it has none of the primitive musical aptitude of Bohemia and the Slavs. The sad aspect of nature and Russian oppression fostered in Finland the quiet and delicate art of jean Sibelius, but even he was caught in the toils of "local colour," and found it difficult to attain symphonic form. He is, however, closely associated with modern picturesque music, the nature of which we shall discuss more thoroughly later.
For centuries the imagination of Europe has revelled in the exotic, finding there, through story-teller and poet, a refuge from the commonplace in everyday life. The spirit of adventure which inspired Robinson Crusoe has affected music also. In music an exotic atmosphere is attained all the more perfectly in that the precision of words is neither sought nor attained; under the spell of unfamiliar rhythms and intervals, of tam-tam, tambourine, castanets, the fancy of those sensitive to music is filled with vague images of distant lands. This is on the romantic side; afterwards the science of folk-lore brings exact research to bear on non-European music, making possible its absorption in the main stream of art.
The earliest exotic influences came from the East. In France, where visual things make so strong an appeal, poets sang the praises of the "Land of the Rising Sun," and music of an Oriental type was early attempted. It was mere play from David Le Désert to Délibes' Lakmé, an essentially trivial, iridescent form, a game, in which the cool, able, French mind amused itself with bright pebbles. Its rhythmic basis was the dance, but in Bizet, who after The Pearl Fishers, Djamileh and The Irlésienne achieved Carmen, the exotic dance rhythm is full of the pulse of life. Its inspiration may not be strictly Oriental, but Spain, far behind in European civilisation, is very near the East in spirit.
The genius of a French composer extracted the musical essences of the South American habanera and seguidilla, of Creole savagery, of that gipsydom which is really a collective denotation hard to define, and blended them in Carmen to an expression of human passion which has a universal human appeal.
Elements of the music of all nations seek in modern music their true fulfilment; what began in play ends in earnest.
It is a relief to turn from this orgy of brilliance and local colour to German music, which by the very lack of these qualities early revealed its depths. German folk-song, ringing the changes on the dominant and the tonic, monotonous in rhythm, contained the germs of both sensibility and harmless gaiety. Its special attribute was universality, and great future possibilities lay in its simplicity, other-worldliness, mysticism. The piety and grave measure of the chorale strengthened this folk-music vet more, while its harmony, colourless and horizontal in structure, was the nucleus of polyphony which, through all adventures and experiments, German music can never altogether lose.
The Austrian element is a wholesome corrective to the over-earnest and sober qualities in German music, striking a more personal note, speeding the soaring flight. Its swinging, jovial rhythm, the basis of country-dance and waltz, inspired Lanner and Strauss, and, one must sorrowfully confess, some modern operettas, but it has, too, as is apparent in Schubert, an underlying sadness. It is ripe to blend with the modern spirit, a fact which brings us to the consideration of Mahler.
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