MUSIC.
THE "CADENZA."
IF you look in that admirably laborious compilation, Grove's Dictionary of Music, under the word cadenza, you will find the following definition of the term : A cadenza in its simplest acceptation is a flourish of indefinite form, introduced upon a bass note immediately preceding a close of some finality. It is added that the arabesque was introduced by singers so that the audience might have their astonishment at the singer's vocal agility fresh in their minds at the end of the song. They took no risks in those days.
"Some finality," like " mobled queen," is good. The urbane caution of those words seems the very antithesis of the essential extravagance of a cadenza. When I say extravagance I do not mean formlessness. Indeed, the best cadenzas seem to me to be those which enclose in them- selves a miniature sonata, like so many in the more elaborate concertos. So that when the aforementioned article goes on to say : The more they have the character of abandonment to impulse the better they are, I do not feel in agreement with it. Consider for a moment how dull and unconvincing are these cadenzas which really are "abandoned to impulse." Many do not occur to me, but it is only necessary to mention those,that Beethoven wrote for his own G major Piano Con- certo and for Mozart's in D minor. Less well known are those that abound in the works of mid-nineteenth century French composers, such as Moscheles and Henri Herz, as well as much of Liszt's salon music, which requires a pianist to indulge in unnecessary antics. These arc not true cadenzas at all ; that is to say, they do not take the essential material of a work and show what it can do under the influence of a mind keyed up for the moment to a dramatic emotional pitch. All they do is to waste the listener's time, distracting his attention from the work in question by passages the only interest of which lies in their difficulty of execution. To this class belong the vocal acrobatics of the eighteenth century and, later, of Rossini's operatic arias—mere fiddling with notes. That Liszt could write real cadenzas we have ample proof from the Sonata in B minor and the E flat Piano Concerto. That in the former work does not "precede a close of some finality," but occurs in the middle of the work. It seems to place the hearer on a height whence he may contemplate, with all the attractions of romantically distorted perspec- tives, jeux &esprit, optical illusions, &c., the country he has just traversed, without doing more than fling an arm out over that which is to come.
In most cases, however, Grove's Dictionary must be allowed to be right, and the function of the cadenza becomes a little different. When it occurs immediately before the coda of the first movement of a concerto, its function is entirely climactic. Far from reminding the listeners of a technical agility they might have forgotten, it gives them something they might never even have suspected. In the silence which follows the tutu i fortissimo before the opening of the cadenza the composer reaches the summit of the mountain and turning round sees for the first time the view behind him. What follows is a rhapsody—extravagant, high-flown, unrestrained, but none the less formal : the mountaineer knows by experience the order of the landscape in the plain ; now he gives the bird's-eye view of it, distorted by his emotion, but recognizable. An exquisite example of this procedure occurs in Schumann's Piano Concerto, though the actual cadenza was, I believe, written by the composer's wife. In this the theme emphasized is that of the first subject of the movement, whereas in general, if the cadenza is at all extended, the most poignant effect is obtained by a skilful use of the second subject, introduced with intense quietness after the first noisy proclamation of excitement.
One of the finest, and at the same time one of the largest and most complex, of cadenzas occurs in the last movement of Elgar's Violin Concerto. The fact that most of it is accom- panied (as in Beethoven's Emperor Concerto) permits of a greater elaboration and ex-tension than is generally possible : it is, in fact, almost a movement in itself—something akin to an operatic Verwandlung or interlude joining two scenes of one act, played with lowered curtain. These Verzvand- lungen, which have become de rigueur in German opera since Wagner's day, perform exactly the same function for an operatic audience as the cadenza for the symphonic. Nothing in the whole range of human experience is more thrilling than the sudden downward swoop of the curtain on (say) the first scene of Act III. of Siegfried. The orchestra rises to take the whole burden of emotion on itself, though in the case I have mentioned the cadenza is a looking-forward rather than a looking-back. But in either case—and Richard Strauss' opera, Die Frau ohne Schatten, contains magnificent examples of the latter variety—the Verwandlung serves to suspend the listener, so to speak, over the whole design of the work ; it sets in order the emotions he has felt during a scene on the open stage and prepares him to meet the next rise of the curtain in a way no silent interval could possibly do. In the last act of Die Meistersinger, for example, the page of music that follows the quintet serves to give the hearer an impression of perfect happiness such as the quintet itself is too poignant and ecstatic fitly to convey.
But one can have too much of even such a good thing as this, and some of the more recent German composers exploit the Verwandlung to an appalling extent. If ever the operas of Schreker, which are immensely popular in Germany, find their way over here, the English musical public will have a chance of testing its endurance. Here we have the German operatic method run riot : the garden has become a mass of monstrous weeds. The Verzvandlungen, numerous and hopelessly long-winded, consist in sudden bursts of Puccinesque sentimentality—cold and calculated " love- music "—interspersed among endless tracts of noisy dullness. This kind of thing corresponds exactly to the fussy, formless cadenzas I have referred to—mere waste of musical time, where the listener is neither assisted to understand what has gone before nor lifted over to what is to come. Where cadenzas are as bad as this they are futility itself ; when they are true and necessary, they show music for what it is—an essentially rhetorical art, proclaiming its absolute importance, its fastuous pride, its vivid uniqueness (if I may be allowed the phrase) among the objects of sensuous contemplation.
EDWARD SACKVILLE WEST.
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