MUS I C.
THE ILLUMINATED SYMPHONY.
CONCERT-GOERS ought to be very grateful to Mr. Herbert Trench for the energy and assiduity which he has dis- played in furnishing them with a new sensation. Whether he has succeeded in presenting us with a new art-form is open to question, but as to the novelty of the enter- tainment provided at the Queen's Hall on Monday night there can be no doubt whatever. The darkened auditorium was borrowed from Bayreuth, but the spectacle of a huge white sheet blocking out the centre of the orchestra, with dark-red hangings and gold wreaths on either side, was wholly unfamiliar in such surroundings; and when, after a prolonged pedal note on the organ, a colossal head of the Apollo Belvidere appeared on the sheet accompanied by a sonorous " pong " on the tam-tam, the audience indicated by unmistakable evidences the consciousness that they were about to witness something rich and strange. Hitherto, when symphonists have founded their compositions on a specific literary work, they have been content with a general admission of the source of their inspiration, or they have printed the text in the programme. We owe to Mr. Trench the innova- tion of having the text of 'Apollo and the Seaman," to which Mr. Joseph Holbrooke has composed his symphonic poem,
thrown by a succession of lantern-slides on a screen so as to synchronise with the progress of the music which forms its commentary and illustration.—The phrase "illuminated symphony," we may note in passing, is slightly misleading, in so far as it may have given rise to the notion that colour would enter into the scheme of presentation, and that a series of kaleidoscopic effects is La Loie Fuller would accompany the performance. No resort was made to such polychromatic devices on Monday, the screen being simply darkened while the text appeared in white on its surface.—The main aim of this " illumination " is clear enough. It is to secure the con- centration of the auditor's attention on the words, and at the same time to eliminate the distracting factors present at a performance held under ordinary conditions,--e.g., the move- ments of the band, the gestures of the conductor, the dresses and faces and expressions of the audience generally.
That the experiment was worth making we are not prepared to deny. Unfortunately, a number of causes combined to render it unsuccessful, or at least unconvincing. To begin with, the focussing of the eye entirely on the words was not by any means completely secured. The soften only covered the central section of the orchestra, and as the band could hardly be expected to play in the dark, the players who sat at the sides were distinctly visible, and provided an element of distraction almost as disturbing as if the whole force had been in full view. The method of presenting the text, again, though rendering it perfectly legible. and distinct, involved a considerable strain even on persons endowed with normal eyesight. Apart from that, the process of throwing the text on a screen piecemeal, in sections of eight or a dozen lines at a time, with a blank interval while the slide was being changed, proved in the present case extremely disconcerting to the reader. It might answer well enough with self-contained heroic couplets, but the solution of continuity in the middle of a sentence—and some of Mr. Trench's sentences are as complicated in construction as they are obscure in meaning—showed that " illumination " does not necessarily make for lucidity. To put it plainly, the poem, quite irrespective of its musical setting, is ill-adapted for this necessarily disconnected method of presentation. This, however, was only a minor drawback compared to the disastrous results of the attempt to make the progress of the poem, as thrown on the screen, synchronise with the progress of the illustrative music. The method of concurrent repre- sentation proceeds on the assumption, or at any rate is eminently calculated to promote the assumption, that the music is not only inspired by the text, but that it follows its varying and successive phases much in the same way that the music of a song by Schubert follows and reinforces the significance of the words. Hence the auditor-spectator is irresistibly and inevitably impelled to look out for a con- tinuous relevance in the musical commentary to the illuminated text. Now in the first place it is by no means certain that Mr. Holbrooke elver intended to adopt the method of continuous parallelism in his composition. What he probably did—we
speak entirely on one own authority—was to regrind the poem as a whole as his "take-off," without in the least binding himself to any consecutive appropriateness in the treatment of details. He had not to write music for a play in dumb .show, but to translate into terms of sound the emotions aroused by a coin- plicated, picturesque, and at times extremely.cryptic discussion of the "pros" and "cons" of personal immortality. The appli- cation of the magic-lantern method to the text in the present case was ece hypothesi inappropriate owing to the structure of the composition ; but the mere fact that it was employed made it impossible for the audience to refrain from trying to fit the words to the music. The result of the attempt was distracting in the extreme, for there was hardly a single moment at which the temper of the poem was reflected in the score, and for the most part the disparity in character was so pronounced as to be positively grotesque. Mr. Trench's poem, though eminently picturesque and highly coloured, is informed from end to end by a spirit of high seriousness, as befits its exalted argument. On the other hand, Mr. Holbrooke's music, though brilliant and ingenious, is, if we except the broad march which figures so prominently in the later stages of the work, essentially freakish, fantastic, and even macabre. This divergence fre- quently assumed an acute form, so that the appearance on the screen of a stanza of a reflective Or tranquil character was accompanied by tumultuous passages in the orchestra, and vice versa'. The incongruity may of course be explained by the inherent differences of structure between a philosophic poem and a symphonic composition already referred to, but a startling alternative theory is propounded in the Birmingham Daily Post of Tuesday. The writer, who is identified by the Manchester Guardian of Wednesday with the well-known musical critic, Mr. Ernest Newman, after commenting on the curious lack of congruity between the poem and music, remarks that at a certain stage of the performance a theme in the score struck him as remotely familiar, and continues :—
"Some seven or eight years ago, Mr. Holbrooke played me the score of a symphonic poem of his on the subject of Edgar Allan Poe's Masque of the Red Death.' The work has never been printed or performed, and I have not heard a note of it from that day to this; but I will wager my salvation that the theme in question was part of it. That explained the mystery, and hence- forth all was clear. The music fitted 'The Masque of the Red Death,' which was why it did not fit 'Apollo and the Seaman."
This is a decidedly sensational method of explaining the
discrepancy between the text and the music, and it is sincerely to be trusted, alike in the interests of the poet and of Mr. Holbrooke, that it may not be allowed to hold the field. One can easily imagine a composer, consciously or unconsciously, borrowing a phrase from an earlier work. But to convey the impression that the music, presumably inspired by a special poem, was in reality an old score founded on an entirely different literary subject is to prefer a charge of cynicism which it is unpleasant to contemplate. At the same time, it amounts to a red uctio ad absurdum of the whole system of programme music.
It only remains to be added that Mr. Thomas Beecham, who conducted the New Symphony orchestra, secured a highly creditable rendering of a score abounding in intricate detaile and elaborate instrumental embroidery. The singing of the Choral Epilogue, on the other hand, left a good deal to be desired in quality of tone and accuracy of pitch.
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