An Italian on Contemporary Music
Modern Composers. By Guido Pannain, translated by Michael R. Bonavia. (Dont. 10s. fid.) This interesting book includes studies of twelve composers of our time, including Richard Strauss (but not Elgar), and a survey of American music. At the beginning is an essay on " Changing Values in Modern Music " in which the author sets down his standards and point of view, not in black and white, but in a big riot of colour. His is an attitude of mind which, in attempting to be comprehensive, often succeeds in being no more than picturesquely chaotic. This is surprising. Mr. Pannain is a critic of good reputation and standing, and, as he is also an Italian, we expect his work to be lucid, whatever else it is. Far from it. Mr. Pannain is so intent upon viewing both the forest and the individual trees at the same time that it is frequently difficult to tell which at the moment he is so.excitedly describing. He takes it upon hint to ridicule the work of Mr. Paul Bekker, but, whether his theories of music are nonsense or not, Bekker does at least take the trouble to make his meaning clear.
Nor can Mr. Pannain be excused on the grounds that we are examining his criticism through the glass of translation, darkly. For the English translation has been most admirably carried out by Mr. Michael R. Bonavia, who, in the wise
observation of his introductory note, gives us reason to believe that he has sometimes been constrained to make the original text clearer. It is not impossible that this English edition has an advantage over the Italian as an approach to Mr. Pannain's theories. The great interest of the book lies in the opportunity it affords of studying yet another example of the methods and substance of Continental criticism.
Something of Mr. Pannain's method can be conveyed in three short quotations. The first pertains to Richard Strauss, to discuss whom " is to put on its trial the artistic taste of the European middle classes at the end of the nineteenth century—the comfortable bourgeoisie of business, full of common sense and utilitarian energy, but poor in spiritual qualities : the class which, &c." ; the second to Hindemith who, being " a characteristic product of the post-War outlook, can be identified with the whole problem of the new music " ; the third to Schonberg. who "is like a foal whose legs kick out wildly without ever managing to gallop." The method, in fact, is at once too vaguely dispersed and too manifestly unjust in its facile particularities.
After all, at this stage, the author need not have wasted so much of his profusion of metaphor in putting Strauss, Schonberg and Stravinsky in their places. Strauss' position has long ago been determined, and without any of that elabo- rate trial that Mr. Pannain stages here for the benefit of his readers. As for Schonberg and Stravinsky, there is little to add to the findings of Professor Weissmann which were pub- lished four or five years ago. No sane person would be so rash as to assert that the development of music will vromed as if those two had never been born. But how tragic have been their careers I At different times, either could have claimed an almost universal homage. Either could have become a leader and have exerted the influence of a beneficent tyranny. Schonberg's tyranny has brought no profit, no promise of con- solidation. His "transvaluation of- all values" is merely a denial of values, a philosophy of negation. Nor has Stravinsky anything of the leader in his "make-up." An inherited cynicism and (as an artist) a complete lack of parental responsibility have continually checked his development, so that his career, instead of showing a logical line or lines of evolution, appears as a series of brilliant explosions, leaving nothing but a tanta- lising trail of falling sparks.
Mr. Pannain, it is true, makes a genuine attempt to associate himself with the environment of each of his subjects. How far he has been successful in the cases of Falls, Bloch, Kodaly (but Bartok is omitted) and Szymanowski, is best judged, so far as English readers are concerned, by his approach to Dr. Vaughan Williams. And in this essay, it must be confessed, he is again Unconvincing. He must be given credit for taking trouble in studyingthe scores of some of Dr. Vaughan Williams' works, but his criticism is too eager to catch the nearest way of literary allusion, and when he writes " It is difficult to think of the Benedicite without recalling the Mass," one suspects that he is making a very wild shot in the dark. Furthermore, he does not even name two of the greatest of this composer's achieve- ments, the Tanis Fantasia and Job.
This chapter on Dr. Vaughan Williams, however, is instructive. It is unnecessary to search between the lines to discover how the author's point of view has been obtained. It is one more example of the kind of Continental criticism of English music that is content to take its colour from the International Society for Contemporary Music. Few foreign critics realize that, whether because or in spite of the fact that the President of that Society is an Englishman, it is less representative of England than of any other country. A golden opportunity of making foreign musicians aware of the extent of English musical life was wasted when the- Society's Festival was held at Oxford last year. In that direction it could not have been more ineffective, had it been held at Vienna or Moscow or Tokyo. With the result that Continental musicians returned with their one-sided view of English music uncorrected, and with the further result that we are still required to read (and in an English translation) such a gross misrepresentation of English music as is repeated parrot-wise in the first pages of Mr. Pannain's essay on Dr. Vaughan Williams.
BASIL MAINE.
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