Music
THE TREND OF MUSIC ON THE CONTINENT.
[Festivals of music have enjoyed more popularity than ever this summer in Germany. We are glad to publish this record and critique of the season from the pen of a well-known' New York music critic.—En. Spectator.( AFTER fourteen weeks of summer music on the Continent, with almost nightly attendance on opera or concert in a dozen cities of Central Europe, I have the impression of an ever-widening cleavage between those who are listening and those who are composing. Festival performances are probably as fair a test as any, since they are dependent for their success on a more general and less particular support than many programmes of propagandist groups in the regular music seasons of the world capitals. The interest in such paladins of modernity as Arnold Schonberg and Paul Hindemith remains chiefly professional. It is to Mozart and Wagner—yes, to Strauss and even to Mahler—that audiences seeking solace and not merely the appeasing of some small curiosity continue to turn in Germany and Austria. And even when audiences of a highly specialized and preponderantly professional character are assembled, as was true of the Duisburg and Baden-Baden festivals of the tour now under review, the burden of opinion on the new music seems to be much the same as that which is most often heard from the lips of those who are avowedly out of sympathy with modern music and who, therefore, remain away—that it has no clear goal and is deficient in inspiration, whatever the technical artistry with which it is constructed.
These are generalizations varying, of course, in their application to particular works of individual composers. But they sum up, with a degree of rough justice, the attitude of the many who flock to hear Aida in Berlin, Die Meistersinger in Munich, or Don Giovanni in Salzburg, but shrug their shoulders at the mention of Wozzeck, Maschinist Hopkins, Die Gliickliche Hand, or similar works for the lyric stage which can be regarded as representative of some phase or other of modern music. A similar situation in the sister art of letters would be unthinkable. Yet music is written to be heard and enjoyed in the hearing quite as much as books are written to be read and enjoyed in the reading. In the sixteen years that have elapsed since Schonberg completed it, Die Gliickliche Hand has had but four stage performances, and of these two were given at the Duisburg festival of last July. This may be another instance of a work of genius making its way slowly, as the earlier music dramas of Wagner did, or it may be a significant example of a contradictory situation in which audiences are faced one way and composers another, almost as if they were concerned with two antithetical arts.
The music of the chief festivals of the Continent does seem to group itself into these two chief classifications : audience music and composer music, the one chiefly a heritage from the past, the other embracing much, but by no means all, of the product of the men who presumably are mirroring the age. In Berlin, where three opera houses contributed nightly to a • glut of lyric drama during the festival of last May and June, there was a marked falling off of attendance when a work like Alban Berg's Wozzeck or Igor Stravinsky's History of the Soldier was mounted. This could no longer be attributed to unfamiliarity. It was from choice that habitues :of the opera paid higher prices to hear other works. Many of them undoubtedly had nibbled at the idiom of Wozzeck and found it distasteful. .Their friends had sampled the "ironies" of Stravinsky and had not urged them to go. What audiences plainly find wanting in this music is the emotion which they have associated with all the music of the past, not excluding the polyphonic writing of Bach and the liturgical masters. Music, perhaps more than any other art, seems to have gone dry for want of spiritual impetus. Scoffing and parody may be the spirit of the age, and composers who abjure sentiment may be in clear alignment with their fellow-workers in the other arts, but if audiences expect sentiment in music, and turn to older works by preference because they can find it there, that which otherwise might seem inevitable as an expression of the times takes on the aspect of something forced, artificial and unnatural, a cultivated fashion for which there is no real demand.
Because he wrote - more tunefully than' the showmen of the parody-opera (Opera Grotteska) like Ernst Krenek with his Jonny Spiel( Auf—even though his tunefulness was that of another generation—Eugen D'Albert can be said to have elicited a livelier public response with his Sehrvarte Orchidee, a score of no great ingenuity, but one which possessed the sentimentality which the parodists abjured. Germany. in spite of its jazz obsession, is still at heart partial to the waltz. The attempt to be " arnerikanisch " usually ends, as it did indeed with D'Albert, in a little syncopation of strains not to be dissociated from the beer garden.
Maschinist Hopkins was one of nine new works mounted in six days in the opera festival at Duisburg. It and one only of its companions left other than vanishing memories with this visitor. Here was the glorification of the fly-wheel, in exemplification of that trend toward the mechanical which gave to symphonic music its Pacific 231 and aroused some small hubbub among aestheticians. The machine shop becomes a locale for song, and there. are great clanking upbuildings of sound. But if the spectacle is taken away from Maschinist Hopkins, not much remains. Max Brand wrote a score that serves its purposes in the theatre, without, as music, transcending them. Something more must be said of Schtinberg's Gliickliche Hand, which belies its title by being as thoroughly unhappy as any music we know. Here is no mere accompaniment for spectacle, important as are many details of the staging, particularly the lighting. Those who think of Schonberg as primarily cerebral are little prepared for the powerful emotional effect of this music. Perhaps it is decadent—romanticism gone to seed—but it is no mathematical praxis. No little man wrote Die Gliickliche Hand ; without it, Berg's Wozzeck, similarly a pitiless study in despair, probably never would have been.
The most curious synthesis, though perhaps more properly a congeries or farrago, discoverable at the summer festivals was Hindemith's Lehrstiick, the concluding concomitant of Baden Baden's concelebration of modernists. Just what was achieved by combining a film depicting the agonies of dissolution and a scene between three clowns who made use of a carpenter's saw for surgical amputations, with choral and orchestral music having to do with the death of an aviator, this observer does not feel competent to say. As a variety of modern " morality " play, dealing with man's ingratitude to man or the 'wisdom of being humble if one would fly high, this work may have justified its curious miscellany of parts, but for a music critic there is little to chronicle except that some of Hindemith's choral writing had a measure of beauty and even of compassion. The hisses and catcalls evoked by some of the less appetizing details of other elements of the work were not intended for the music.
In collaborating on Lindbergh's Flight, a so-called cantata written especially for wireless transmission, Hindemith and Kurt Weill produced a work incredibly naive and doomed undoubtedly to speedy extinction. It contains a few interest- ing sections, the best being the dialogue between Lindbergh and his motor, and between Sleep and Lindbergh, but these are overwhelmed by the childishness of the entire scheme. Of two programmes devoted to music composed for radio, with its limitations, its advantages and its peculiarities borne in mind by the composers, nothing was of a musical significance to compel recognition after the performance. Technically, the music makers seemed to have attained their ends in avoiding certain pitfalls that experience has shown must be considered in the preparation of music for broadcasting.
So much for the composer music, with its interest chiefly for professionals and its improbability of growing in the affections of the larger public which alone keeps music alive. For this larger public, Berlin presented an unusually extensive repertory, ranging from Gluck to Strauss, from (Amoroso to Wagner, from Mozart to Verdi, from Beethoven to Offenbach. The superb ensemble of the Scala company under Toscanini justified the furore created, although the singing of his Italian principals was not of a superior order. Dresden sponsored worth-while revivals of Berlioz 's Benvenuto Cellini and Handel's Xerxes. Halle, too, had its Handel opera, in Julius Caesar, to shame an England slow to bring back the great works of the early Georgian era. Munich with its Ring, its Tristan and Isolde, its Parsifal, its Lekengrin, its Meistersinger and its newly staged Fliegende Hollander, profited by the absence of a Wagner festival at Bayreuth this year, and gave the five Mozart operas of its repertoire in the perfect frame of the little rococo Residenzthealer. Salzburg, with its Don Giovanni, its Fidelio, and its new version of Rosenkavalier, played its part in rewarding tourists not too critical in their demands for the highest quality of singing. Wfirzburg, abjuring opera, proved again how vital the chamber and orchestra music of Mozart is to-day, however alien its spirit may be to that of the age reflected in Wozzeck, Maschinist Hopkins, and the oddities of opera grottesca.
OSCAR THOMPSON.
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