MR. HADOW'S MUSICAL ESSAYS.*
WHEN Mr. Hadow published his first volume of Studies ia Modern Music a couple of years ago, it was remarked of him by a leading contemporary that "he is a Fellow of Worcester College, but there is no trace of amateurishness in the treat- ment of his subjects." This quaintly worded sentence, while strictly true, may be taken to illustrate the view that prevails in certain quarters that only professional musicians have any right to discourse about music. As a matter of fact, there are probably very few professional musical critics in this country who are technically as well equipped as Mr. Hadow, • Studies in Modern Music. Second Series. By W. H. Hadow, MA. With Four Portraits on Copper. London: Boole; and Co. and certainly none who can surpass him in the fine literary quality of his work or the breadth of his culture.
The composers dealt with in the present volume are Chopin, Dvorak, and Brahma, and, as before, Mr. Hadow adopts the method of giving in each case a biographical sketch, followed by a critical estimate. In the case of Chopin, the dispas- sionateness of Mr. Hadow's attitude may be evidenced from the fact that he entirely acquits George Sand of the charges of heartlessness and treachery levelled against her by so many of her compatriots ; and certainly the testimony of Matthew Arnold, of Sainte-Beuve, of Heine, and of the Brownings, is not lightly to be discarded. With regard to Chopin's debut in Paris we are glad to be able to answer a question as to the names of the five pianists who assisted him on that memorable occasion. Mr. Hadow gives four, and speculates who the fifth might be. The fifth, as we happen to know, was George Osborne, the popular Irish composer and pianist, the intimate friend of Berlioz and Chopin, who died only last year in London. Mr. Hadow notes the curious fact about Chopin, that although his inspiration was facile, he revised his MSS.
with a conscientiousness that amounted to positive self. torture, and then, directly his work was printed, adopted an attitude of indifference, with the result that no composer
has allowed so many misprints to pass unnoticed. As Mr. Hadow puts it, "he took so long making up his mind, that when he had once arrived at a decision, he accepted it as the end of his responsibilities." It is curious also, as Mr. Hadow points out, that, though fond of teaching, he never formed a famous pupil. But then his favourite pupils were mostly amateurs ; and more than that, Chopin's playing, like
his music, seems to have been something unique and in- communicable. He stood alone, "as the nightingale sings."
The concluding appreciation is full of acute and felicitous passages, notably that in which Mr. Hadow traces the influence exerted on Chopin by the music of his native land.
His comparative indifference to the requirements of key relationship is ingeniously attributed to this cause. The Polish folk-songs are not written in our modern scale ; "as a Pole he approached our western key system from the outside." Excellent, again, is the remark that of all musicians he is most at the mercy of his interpreters, while "the extra- ordinary tact and intelligence with which he employs his medium" is happily illustrated by the observation that Chopin "has almost entirely escaped the sacrilegious hand of the transcriber." As a specimen alike of Mr. Hadow's style and of his insight, we may quote the striking passage which concludes this chapter
"To sum up, Chopin can claim no place amongst the few greatest masters of the world. He lacks the dignity, the breadth, the high seriousness of Palestrina and Bach and Beethoven ; he no more ranks beside them than Shelley beside Shakespeare, or Andrea beside Michael Angelo. But to say this is not to disparage the value of the work that he has done. If he be not of the 'di majorum gentium,' he is none the less of the Immortals, filled with a supreme sense of beauty, animated by an emotional impulse as keen as it was varied, and upholding an ideal of technical perfection at a time when it was in danger of being lost by the poets, or degraded by the virtuosi. In certain definite directions he has enlarged the possibilities of the art, and though he has, for- tunately founded no school—for the charm of his music is wholly personal—yet in a thousand indirect ways he has influenced the work of his successors. At the same time, it is not as a pioneer that he elicits our fullest admiration. We hardly think of him as marking a stage in the general course and progress of artistic history, but rather as standing aside from it, unconscious of his relation to the world, preoccupied with the fairyland of his own creations. The elements of myth and legend that have already gathered round his name may almost be said to find their counter- parts in his music; it is ethereal, unearthly, enchanted, an echo from the melodies of Kubla Khan. It is for this reason that he can only make his complete appeal to certain moods and certain temperaments. The strength of the hero is as little his as the vulgarity of the demagogue ; he possesses an intermediate king- dom of dreams, an isle of fantasy, where the air is drowsy with perfume, and the woods are bright with butterflies, and the long gorges run down to meet the sea. If his music is sometimes visionary, at least it is all beautiful ; offering, it may be, no response to the deeper questions of our life, careless if we approach it with problems which it is in no mind to resolve, but fascinating in its magic if we are content to submit our imagina- tion to the spell There have been higher ideals in Music, but not one that has been more clearly seen or more consistently followed. There have been nobler messages, but none delivered with a sweeter or more persuasive eloquence."
The study of Dvorak is especially welcome in that it supplies a regrettable omission from Mr. Fuller-Maitland's otherwise excellent book on the modern German masters.
Some idea of the thoroughness with which Mr. Hadow has acquitted himself of this task may be gathered from the fact that he has not only visited the birthplace of the composer, but studied contemporary documents in the libraries of Prague, and examined the MS. scores of Dvorak's operas at the Czech National Theatre in the Bohemian capital. The account of Dvorak's youth and early years is, in consequence, much fuller than any that has yet appeared in English, and, in particular, contains an excellent sketch of the Bohemian Renaissance, which, for practical purposes, dates from the return of Smetana in 1860. The full history of Dvorak-'s first opera is an episode perhaps unique in the annals of the art. First of all the music, written a /a Wagner, was pro- nounced impossible. Whereon Dvorak wrote an entirely new musical version. The opera was produced, but failed because the play could not be acted. Finally, Dvorak secured a new librettist, and all went well. But Mr. Hadow refrains from what to us is the obvious comment, that the whole story is only one of many evidences of the singular limitations by which Dvorak is hampered. The plain fact is that there never was a modern musician of genius of less literary culture than Dvorak, and it is rather strange that a critic of such considerable literary gifts as Mr. Hadow should have failed to emphasise this notorious failing. We cannot agree, again, with Mr. Hadow's view that "our own reputation" is chiefly to blame for the failure of Dvorak's "St. Ludmila," which is largely dominated by the influence of Handel and Mendelssohn. If a composer deliberately writes to please the taste of his audience and fails, he has only himself to thank for the untoward results of bearing false witness to himself. The final " appreciation " is full of acute observations, as, for example, when Mr. Hadow notes how in Dvorak the sense of colour preponderates over the sense of outline, or points out that Dvorak is "the one solitary instance of a composer who adopts the chromatic scale as unit, who regards all notes as equally related." It is rather disappointing to find that Mr. Hadow excludes from his purview Dvorak's most recent compositions, for his criticism on the principle involved in Dvorak's sensa- tional use of negro melodies in symphony and chamber music, would be well worth reading. But with this deduction, the essay is instructive as well as sympathetic. For the chapter on Brahma, which concludes the volume, we have nothing but praise. Mr. Hadow strikes a true note when, in mentioning Brahma's advent in Vienna, he says, "Men were glad to welcome a new genius of conspicuous power and encyclopadic knowledge, who never spoke of himself, who never wrote a line in his own defence, who never attacked an opponent or depreciated a rival." Apropos of Brahms's happy audacity in building his " Academic " overture—written as the Thesis for his D egree in Philosophy at Breslau—on several well-known student-songs, Mr. Hadow observes, "Not even Brahma could offer, as a Doctor's exercise at Oxford or Cambridge, a work based on the melodies with which our own studious youth beguiles its leisure moments." Brahma would not, if he could ; but after Dvorak's recent exploits one can quite easily imagine his writing an overture on "After the Ball."
We may conclude this necessarily imperfect survey of a singularly interesting and suggestive book with a couple of instances of Mr. Hadow's felicitous critical insight. "Berlioz," he Bays in one passage, "took Beethoven for his master, but it was as a poet, not as a musician." "Many composers," he observes, "become commonplace when they try to be simple : they can only seize our attention with an effort, with some special trick of colour or contrast. Brahma, who has at his command every shade in the whole gamut of colour, can make an abiding masterpiece with a few strokes in black and white."
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