Old Scores and New Readings by John F. Runciman

J >> John F. Runciman >> Old Scores and New Readings

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12

OLD SCORES AND NEW READINGS ...

Discussions on Music & Certain Musicians

by

JOHN F. RUNCIMAN

London at the Sign
of the Unicorn
VII Cecil Court

MDCCCCI

CONTENTS

WILLIAM BYRDE, HIS MASS

OUR LAST GREAT MUSICIAN (HENRY PURCELL, 1658-95)

BACH; THE "MATTHEW" PASSION AND THE "JOHN"

HANDEL

HAYDN AND HIS "CREATION"

MOZART, HIS "DON GIOVANNI" AND THE REQUIEM

"FIDELIO"

SCHUBERT

WEBER AND WAGNER

ITALIAN OPERA, DEAD AND DYING

VERDI YOUNG, AND VERDI YOUNGER

"THE FLYING DUTCHMAN"

"LOHENGRIN"

"TRISTAN AND ISOLDA"

"SIEGFRIED"

"THE DUSK OF THE GODS"

"PARSIFAL"

BAYREUTH IN 1897

A NOTE ON BRAHMS

ANTON DVORAK

TSCHAIKOWSKY AND HIS "PATHETIC" SYMPHONY

LAMOUREUX AND HIS ORCHESTRA

WILLIAM BYRDE ... HIS MASS

Many years ago, in the essay which is set second in this collection,
I wrote (speaking of the early English composers) that "at length the
first great wave of music culminated in the works of Tallis and
Byrde ... Byrde is infinitely greater than Tallis, and seems worthy
indeed to stand beside Palestrina." Generally one modifies one's
opinions as one grows older; very often it is necessary to reverse
them. This one on Byrde I adhere to: indeed I am nearly proud of
having uttered it so long ago. I had then never heard the Mass in D
minor. But in the latter part of 1899 Mr. R.R. Terry, the organist of
Downside Abbey, and one of Byrde's latest editors, invited me to the
opening of St. Benedict's Church, Ealing, where the Mass in D minor
was given; and there I heard one of the most splendid pieces of music
in the world adequately rendered under very difficult conditions. I
use the phrase advisedly--"one of the most splendid pieces of music in
the world." When the New Zealander twenty centuries hence reckons up
the European masters of music, he will place Byrde not very far down
on the list of the greatest; and he will esteem Byrde's Mass one of
the very finest ever written. Byrde himself has rested peacefully in
his grave for over three hundred years. One or two casual critics have
appreciated him. Fetis, I believe, called him "the English
Palestrina"; but I do not recall whether he meant that Byrde was as
great as Palestrina or merely great amongst the English--whether a
"lord amongst wits," or simply "a wit amongst lords." For the most
part he has been left comfortably alone, and held to be--like his
mighty successor Purcell--one of the forerunners of the "great English
school of church composers." To have prepared the way for Jackson in
F--that has been thought his best claim to remembrance. The notion is
as absurd as would be the notion (if anyone were foolish enough to
advance it) that Palestrina is mainly to be remembered as having
prepared the way for Perosi. Byrde prepared the way for Purcell, it is
true; but even that exceeding glory pales before the greater glory of
having written the Cantiones Sacrae and the D minor Mass. In its way
the D minor Mass is as noble and complete an achievement as the St.
Matthew Passion or the "Messiah," the Choral symphony of Beethoven or
the G minor symphony of Mozart, "Tristan" or the "Nibelung's Ring." It
is splendidly planned; it is perfectly beautiful; and from the first
page to the last it is charged with a grave, sweet, lovely emotion.

The reason why Byrde has not until lately won the homage he deserves
is simply this: that the musical doctors who have hitherto judged him
have judged him in the light of the eighteenth-century contrapuntal
music, and have applied to him in all seriousness Artemus Ward's joke
about Chaucer--"he couldn't spell." The plain harmonic progressions
of the later men could be understood by the doctors: they could not
understand the freer style of harmony which prevailed before the
strict school came into existence. Artemus Ward, taking up Chaucer,
professed amazement to find spelling that would not be tolerated in an
elementary school; the learned doctors, taking up Byrde, found he had
disregarded all the rules--rules, be it remembered, formulated after
Byrde's time, just as our modern rules of spelling were made after
Chaucer's time; and as Artemus Ward jocularly condemned Chaucer, and
showed his wit in the joke, so the doctors seriously condemned Byrde,
and showed their stupidity in their unconscious joke. They could
understand one side of Tallis. His motet in forty parts, for instance:
they knew the difficulties of writing such a thing, and they could see
the ingenuity he showed in his various ways of getting round the
difficulties. They could not see the really fine points of the
forty-part motet: the broad scheme of the whole thing, and the almost
Handelian way of massing the various choirs so as to heap climax on
climax until a perfectly satisfying finish was reached. Still, there
was something for them to see in Tallis; whereas in Byrde there was
nothing for them to see that they had eyes to see, or to hear that
they had ears to hear. They could see that he either wrote consecutive
fifths and octaves, or dodged them in a way opposed to all the rules,
that he wrote false relations with the most outrageous recklessness,
that his melodies were irregular and not measured out by the bar; but
they could not feel, could not be expected to feel, the marvellous
beauty of the results he got by his dodges, the marvellous
expressiveness of his music. These old doctors may be forgiven, and,
being long dead, they care very little whether they are forgiven or
not. But the modern men who parrot-like echo their verdicts cannot and
should not be forgiven. We know now that the stiff contrapuntal school
marked a stage in development of music which it was necessary that
music should go through. The modern men who care nothing for
rules--for instance Wagner and Tschaikowsky--could not have come
immediately after Byrde; even Beethoven could not have come
immediately after Byrde and Sweelinck and Palestrina, all of whom
thought nothing of the rules that had not been definitely stated in
their time. Before Beethoven--and after Beethoven, Wagner and all the
moderns--could come, music had to go through the stiff scientific
stage; a hundred thousand things that had been done instinctively by
the early men had to be reduced to rule; a science as well as an art
of music had to be built up. It was built up, and in the process of
building up noble works of art were achieved. After it was built up
and men had got, so to say, a grip of music and no longer merely
groped, Beethoven and Wagner went back to the freedom and
indifference to rule of the first composers; and the mere fact of
their having done so should show us that the rules were nothing in
themselves, nothing, that is, save temporary guide-posts or landmarks
which the contrapuntal men set up for their own private use while they
were exploring the unknown fields of music. We should know, though
many of us do not, that it is simply stupid to pass adverse judgment
on the early composers who did not use, and because they did not use,
these guide-posts, which had not then been set up, though one by one
they were being set up. For a very short time the rules of
counterpoint were looked upon as eternal and immutable. During that
period the early men were human-naturally looked upon as barbarians.
But that period is long past. We know the laws of counterpoint to be
not eternal, not immutable; but on the contrary to have been
short-lived convention that is now altogether disregarded. So it is
time to look at the early music through our own, and not through the
eighteenth-century doctors' eyes; and when we do that we find the
early music to be as beautiful as any ever written, as expressive, and
quite as well constructed. There are, as I have said, people who
to-day prefer Mr. Jackson in F and his friends to Byrde. What, I
wonder, would be said if a literary man preferred, say, some
eighteenth-century poetaster to Chaucer because the poetaster in his
verse observed rules which Chaucer never dreamed of, because, to drag
in Artemus Ward once again, the poetaster's spelling conformed more
nearly to ours than Chaucer's!

The Mass is indeed noble and stately, but it is miraculously
expressive as well. Its expressiveness is the thing that strikes one
more forcibly every time one hears it. At first one feels chiefly its
old-world freshness--not the picturesque spring freshness of Purcell
and Handel, but a freshness that is sweet and grave and cool, coming
out of the Elizabethan days when life, at its fastest, went
deliberately, and was lived in many-gabled houses with trees and
gardens, or in great palaces with pleasant courtyards, and the Thames
ran unpolluted to the sea, and the sun shone daily even in London, and
all things were fair and clean. It is old-world music, yet it stands
nearer to us than most of the music written in and immediately after
Handel's period, the period of dry formalism and mere arithmetic.
There is not a sign of the formal melodic outlines which we recognise
at once in any piece out of the contrapuntal time, not an indication
that the Academic, "classical," unpoetic, essay-writing eighteenth
century was coming. The formal outlines had not been invented, for
rules and themes that would work without breaking the rules were
little thought of. Byrde evades the rules in the frankest manner: in
this Mass alone there are scores of evasions that would have been
inevitably condemned a century afterwards, and might even be
condemned by the contrapuntists of to-day. The eighteenth-century
doctors who edited Byrde early in this century did not in the least
understand why he wrote as he did, and doubtless would have put him
right if they had thought of having the work sung instead of simply
having it printed as an antiquarian curiosity. The music does not
suggest the eighteenth century with its jangling harpsichords, its
narrow, dirty streets, its artificiality, its brilliant candle-lighted
rooms where the wits and great ladies assembled and talked more or
less naughtily. There is indeed a strange, pathetic charm in the
eighteenth century to which no one can be indifferent: it is a dead
century, with the dust upon it, and yet a faint lingering aroma as of
dead rose petals. But the old-world atmosphere of Byrde's music is, at
least to me, something finer than that: it is the atmosphere of a
world which still lives: it is remote from us and yet very near: for
the odour of dead rose petals and dust you have a calm cool air, and a
sense of fragrant climbing flowers and of the shade of full foliaged
trees. All is sane, clean, fresh: one feels that the sun must always
have shone in those days. This quality, however, it shares with a
great deal of the music of the "spacious days" of Elizabeth. But of
its expressiveness there is not too much to be found in the music of
other musicians than Byrde in Byrde's day. He towered high above all
the composers who had been before him; he stands higher than any
other English musician who has lived since, with the exception of
Purcell. It is foolish to think of comparing his genius with the
genius of Palestrina; but the two men will also be reckoned close
together by those who know this Mass and the Cantiones Sacrae. They
were both consummate masters of the technique of their art; they both
had a fund of deep and original emotion; they both knew how to express
it through their music. I have not space to mention all the examples I
could wish. But every reader of this article may be strongly
recommended at once to play, even on the piano, the sublime passage
beginning at the words "Qui propter nos homines," noting more
especially the magnificent effect of the swelling mass of sound
dissolving in a cadence at the "Crucifixus." Another passage, equal to
any ever written, begins at "Et unam Sanctam Catholicam." There is a
curious energy in the repetition of "Et Apostolicam Ecclesiam," and
then a wistful sweetness and tenderness at "Confiteor unum baptisma."
Again, the whole of the "Agnus" is divine, the repeated "miserere
nobis," and the passage beginning at the "Dona nobis pacem,"
possessing that sweetness, tenderness and wonderful calm. But there is
not a number that does not contain passages which one must rank
amongst the greatest things in the world; and it must be borne in mind
that these passages are not detached, nor in fact detachable, but
integral, essential parts of a fine architectural scheme.

OUR LAST GREAT MUSICIAN (HENRY PURCELL, 1658-95)

I.

Purcell is too commonly written of as "the founder of the English
school" of music. Now, far be it from me to depreciate the works of
the composers who are supposed to form the "English school." I would
not sneer at the strains which have lulled to quiet slumbers so many
generations of churchgoers. But everyone who knows and loves Purcell
must enter a most emphatic protest against that great composer being
held responsible, if ever so remotely, for the doings of the "English
school." Jackson (in F), Boyce and the rest owed nothing to Purcell;
the credit of having founded _them_ must go elsewhere, and may beg a
long time, I am much afraid, in the land of the shades before any
composer will be found willing to take it. Purcell was not the founder
but the splendid close of a school, and that school one of the very
greatest the world has seen. And to-day, when he is persistently
libelled, not more in blame than in the praise which is given him, it
seems worth while making a first faint attempt to break through the
net of tradition that has been woven and is daily being woven closer
around him, to see him as he stands in such small records as may be
relied upon and not as we would fain have him be, to understand his
relation to his predecessors and learn his position in musical
history, to hear his music without prejudice and distinguish its
individual qualities. This is a hard task, and one which I can only
seek to achieve here in the roughest and barest manner; yet any manner
at all is surely much better than letting the old fictions go
unreproved, while our greatest musician drifts into the twilight past,
misunderstood, unloved, unremembered, save when an Abbey wants a new
case for its organ, an organ on which Purcell never played, or a
self-styled Purcell authority wishes to set up a sort of claim of part
or whole proprietorship in him.

II.

Hardly more is known of Purcell than of Shakespeare. There is no
adequate biography. Hawkins and Burney (who is oftenest Hawkins at
second-hand) are alike rash, random, and untrustworthy, depending much
upon the anecdotage of old men, who were no more to be believed than
the ancient bandsmen of the present day who tell you how Mendelssohn
or Wagner flattered them or accepted hints from them. Cummings' life
is scarcely even a sketch; at most it is a thumbnail sketch. Only
ninety-five pages deal with Purcell, and of these at least ninety-four
are defaced by maudlin sentimentality, or unhappy attempts at
criticism (see the remarks on the Cecilia Ode) or laughable sequences
of disconnected incongruities--as, for instance, when Mr. Cummings
remarks that "Queen Mary died of small-pox, and the memory of her
goodness was felt so universally," etc. Born in 1658, Purcell lived in
Pepys' London, and died in 1095, having written complimentary odes to
three kings--Charles the Second, James the Second, and William the
Third. Besides these complimentary odes, he wrote piles of
instrumental music, a fair heap of anthems, and songs and interludes
and overtures for some forty odd plays. This is nearly the sum of our
knowledge. His outward life seems to have been uneventful enough. He
probably lived the common life of the day--the day being, as I have
said, Pepys' day. Mr. Cummings has tried to show him as a seventeenth
century Mendelssohn--conventionally idealised--and he quotes the
testimony of some "distinguished divine," chaplain to a nobleman, as
though we did not know too well why noblemen kept chaplains in those
days to regard their testimony as worth more than other men's. The
truth is, that if Purcell had lived differently from his neighbours he
would have been called a Puritan. On the other hand, we must remember
that he composed so much in his short life that his dissipations must
have made a poor show beside those of many of his great
contemporaries--those of Dryden, for instance, who used to hide from
his duns in Purcell's private room in the clock-tower of St. James's
Palace. I picture him as a sturdy, beef-eating Englishman, a puissant,
masterful, as well as lovable personality, a born king of men,
ambitious of greatness, determined, as Tudway says, to exceed every
one of his time, less majestic than Handel, perhaps, but full of
vigour and unshakable faith in his genius. His was an age when genius
inspired confidence both in others and in its possessor, not, as now,
suspicion in both; and Purcell was believed in from the first by many,
and later, by all--even by Dryden, who began by flattering Monsieur
Grabut, and ended, as was his wont, by crossing to the winning side.
And Purcell is no more to be pitied for his sad life than to be
praised as a conventionally idealised Mendelssohn. His life was brief,
but not tragic. He never lacked his bread as Mozart lacked his; he was
not, like Beethoven, tormented by deafness and tremblings for the
immediate future; he had no powerful foes to fight, for he did not bid
for a great position in the world like Handel. Nor was he a romantic
consumptive like Chopin, with a bad cough, a fastidious regard for
beauty, and a flow of anaemic melody. He was divinely gifted with a
greater richness of invention than was given to any other composers
excepting two, Bach and Mozart; and death would not take his gifts as
an excuse when he was thirty-seven. Hence our Mr. Cummings has
droppings of lukewarm tears; hence, generally, compassion for his
comparatively short life has ousted admiration for his mighty works
from the minds of those who are readier at all times to indulge in the
luxury of weeping than to feel the thrill of joy in a life greatly
lived. Purcell might have achieved more magnificent work, but that is
a bad reason for forgetting the magnificence of the work he did
achieve. But I myself am forgetting that the greatness of his music is
not admitted, and that the shortness of his life is merely urged as an
excuse for not finding it admirable. And remembering this, I assert
that Purcell's life was a great and glorious one, and that now his
place is with the high gods whom we adore, the lords and givers of
light.

III.

Before Purcell's position in musical history can be ascertained and
fixed, it is absolutely necessary to make some survey of the rise of
the school of which he was the close.

In our unmusical England of to-day it is as hard to believe in an
England where music was perhaps the dominant passion of the people as
it is to understand how this should have been forgotten in a more
musical age than ours. Until the time of Handel's arrival in this
country there was no book printed which did not show unmistakably that
its writer loved music. It is a fact (as the learned can vouch) that
Erasmus considered the English the most given up to music of all the
peoples of Europe; and how far these were surpassed by the English is
further shown by the fact that English musicians were as common in
continental towns in those days as foreign musicians are in England
nowadays. I refrain from quoting Peacham, North, Anthony Wood, Pepys,
and the rest of the much over-quoted; but I wish to lay stress on the
fact that here music was widespread and highly cultivated, just as it
was in Germany in the eighteenth century. Moreover, an essential
factor in the development of the German school was not wanting in
England. Each German prince had his Capellmeister; and English nobles
and gentlemen, wealthier than German princes, differing from them only
in not being permitted to assume a pretentious title, had each his
Musick-master. I believe I could get together a long list of musicians
who were thus kept. It will be remembered that when Handel came to
England he quickly entered the service of the Duke of Chandos. The
royal court always had a number of musicians employed in the making or
the performing of music. Oliver Cromwell retained them and paid them;
Charles the Second added to them, and in many cases did not pay them
at all, so that at least one is known to have died of starvation, and
the others were everlastingly clamouring for arrears of salary. It was
the business of these men (in the intervals of asking for their
salaries) to produce music for use in the church and in the house or
palace; that for church use being of course nearly entirely
vocal--masses or anthems; that for house use, vocal and
instrumental--madrigals and fancies (_i.e._ fantasias). As generation
succeeded generation, a certain body of technique was built up and a
mode of expression found; and at length the first great wave of music
culminated in the works of Tallis and Byrde. Their technique and mode
of expression I shall say something about presently; and all the
criticism I have to pass on them is that Byrde is infinitely greater
than Tallis, and seems worthy indeed to stand beside Palestrina and
Sweelinck. Certainly anyone who wishes to have a true notion of the
music of this period should obtain (if he can) copies of the D minor
five-part mass, and the Cantiones Sacrae, and carefully study such
numbers as the "Agnus Dei" of the former and the profound "Tristitia
et anxietas" in the latter.

The learned branch of the English school reached its climax. Meantime
another branch, not unlearned, but caring less for scholastic
perfection than for perfect expression of poetic sentiment, was fast
growing. The history of the masque is a stale matter, so I will merely
mention that Campion, and many another with, before, and after him,
engaged during a great part of their lives in what can only be called
the manufacture of these entertainments. A masque was simply a
gorgeous show of secular ritual, of colour and of music--a kind of
Drury Lane melodrama in fact, but as far removed from Drury Lane as
this age is from that in the widespread faculty of appreciating
beauty. The music consisted of tunes of a popular outline and
sentiment, but they were dragged into the province of art by the
incapacity of those who wrote or adapted them to touch anything
without leaving it lovelier than when they lighted on it. Pages might
be, and I daresay some day will be, written about Dr. Campion's
melody, its beauty and power, the unique sense of rhythmic subtleties
which it shows, and withal its curiously English quality. But one
important thing we must observe: it is wholly secular melody. Even
when written in the ecclesiastical modes, it has no, or the very
slightest, ecclesiastical tinge. It is folk-melody with its face
washed and hair combed; it bears the same relation to English
folk-melody as a chorale from the "Matthew" Passion bears to its
original. Another important point is this: whereas the church
composers took a few Latin sentences and made no endeavour to treat
them so as to make sense in the singing, but made the words wait upon
the musical phrases, in Dr. Campion we see the first clear wish to
weld music and poem into one flawless whole. To an extent he
succeeded, but full success did not come till several generations had
first tried, tried and failed. Campion properly belongs to the
sixteenth century, and Harry Lawes, born twenty-five years before
Campion died, as properly belongs to the seventeenth century. In his
songs we find even more marked the determination that words and music
shall go hand in hand--that the words shall no longer be dragged at
the cart-tail of the melody, so to say. In fact, a main objection
against Lawes--and a true one in many instances--is that he sacrificed
the melody rather than the meaning of the poem. This is significant.
The Puritans are held to have damaged church music less by burning the
choir-books and pawning the organ-pipes than by insisting (as we may
say) on One word one note. As a matter of fact, this was not
exclusively a plank in the political platform of the Puritans. The
Loyalist Campion, the Loyalist Lawes, and many another Loyalist
insisted on it. Even when they did not write a note to each word, they
took care not to have long roulades (divisions) on unimportant words,
but to derive the accent of the music from that of the poem. This
showed mainly two tendencies: first, one towards expression of poetic
feeling and towards definiteness of that expression, the other towards
the entirely new technique which was to supersede the contrapuntal
technique of Byrde and Palestrina. In making a mass or an anthem or
secular composition, the practice of these old masters was to start
with a fragment of church or secular melody which we will call A;
after (say) the trebles had sung it or a portion of it, the altos took
it up and the trebles went on to a new phrase B, which dovetailed with
A. Then the tenors took up A, the altos went on to B, the trebles went
on to a new phrase C, until ultimately, if we lettered each
successive phrase that appeared, we should get clear away from the
beginning of the alphabet to X, Y, and Z. This, of course, is a crude
and stiff way of describing the process of weaving and interweaving by
which the old music was spun, for often the phrase A would come up
again and again in one section of a composition and sometimes
throughout the whole, and strict canon was comparatively rare in music
which was not called by that name; but the description will serve.
This technique proved admirable for vocal polyphony--how admirable we
have all the Flemish and Italian and English contrapuntal music to
show. But it was no longer available when music was wanted for the
single voice, unless that voice was treated as one of several real
parts, the others being placed in the accompaniment. A new technique
was therefore wanted. For that new technique the new composers went
back to the oldest technique of all. The old minstrels used music as a
means of giving accent and force to their poems; and now, as a means
of spinning a web of tone which should not only be beautiful, but also
give utterance to the feeling of the poem, composers went back to the
method of the minstrels. They disregarded rhythm more and more (as may
be seen if you compare Campion with Lawes), and sought only to make
the notes follow the accent of the poetry, thus converting music into
conventionally idealised speech or declamation. Lawes carried this
method as far as ever it has been, and probably can be, carried. When
Milton said,

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12