Plays, Acting and Music Part 8

When G.o.dowsky plays he sits bent and motionless, as if picking out a pattern with his fingers. He seems to keep surrept.i.tious watch upon them, as they run swiftly on their appointed errands. There is no errand they are not nimble enough to carry without a stumble to the journey's end. They obey him as if in fear; they dare not turn aside from the straight path; for their whole aim is to get to the end of the journey, having done their task faultlessly. Sometimes, but without relaxing his learned gravity, he plays a difficult game, as in the Paganini variations of Brahms, which were done with a skill as sure and as soulless as Paganini's may have been. Sometimes he forgets that the notes are living things, and tosses them about a little cruelly, as if they were a juggler's b.a.l.l.s. They drop like stones; you are sorry for them, because they are alive. How Chopin suffers, when he plays the Preludes! He plays them without a throb; the scholar has driven out the magic; Chopin becomes a mathematician. In Brahms, in the G Minor Rhapsody, you hear much more of what Brahms meant to do; for Brahms has set strange shapes dancing, like the skeletons "in the ghosts'

moons.h.i.+ne" in a ballad of Beddoes; and these bodiless things take shape in the music, as G.o.dowsky plays it unflinchingly, giving it to you exactly as it is, without comment. Here his fidelity to every outline of form becomes an interpretation. But Chopin is so much more than form that to follow every outline of it may be to leave Chopin out of the outline.

Pachmann, of all the interpreters of Chopin, is the most subtle, the one most likely to do for the most part what Chopin wanted. The test, I think, is in the Third Scherzo. That great composition, one of the greatest among Chopin's works, for it contains all his qualities in an intense measure, might have been thought less likely to be done perfectly by Pachmann than such Coleridge in music, such murmurings out of paradise, as the Etude in F Minor (Op. 25, No. 2) or one of those Mazurkas in which Chopin is more poignantly fantastic in substance, more wild and whimsical in rhythm, than elsewhere in his music; and indeed, as Pachmann played them, they were strange and lovely gambols of unchristened elves. But in the Scherzo he mastered this great, violent, heroic thing as he had mastered the little freakish things and the trickling and whispering things. He gave meaning to every part of its decoration, yet lost none of the splendour and wave-like motion of the whole tossing and eager sea of sound.

Pachmann's art, like Chopin's, which it perpetuates, is of that peculiarly modern kind which aims at giving the essence of things in their fine shades: "la nuance encor!" Is there, it may be asked, any essential thing left out in the process; do we have attenuation in what is certainly a way of sharpening one's steel to a very fine point? The sharpened steel gains in what is most vital in its purpose by this very paring away of its substance; and why should not a form of art strike deeper for the same reason? Our only answer to Whistler and Verlaine is the existence of Rodin and Wagner. There we have weight as well as sharpness; these giants fly. It was curious to hear, in the vast luminous music of the "Rheingold," flowing like water about the earth, bare to its roots, not only an amplitude but a delicacy of fine shades not less realised than in Chopin. Wagner, it is true, welds the lyric into drama, without losing its lyrical quality. Yet there is no perfect lyric which is made less by the greatness of even a perfect drama.

Chopin was once thought to be a drawing-room composer; Pachmann was once thought to be no "serious artist." Both have triumphed, not because the taste of any public has improved, but because a few people who knew have whispered the truth to one another, and at last it has leaked out like a secret.

PADEREWSKI

I shall never cease to a.s.sociate Paderewski with the night of the Jubilee. I had gone on foot from the Temple through those packed, gaudy, noisy, and vulgarised streets, through which no vehicles could pa.s.s, to a rare and fantastic house at the other end of London, a famous house hospitable to all the arts; and Paderewski sat with closed eyes and played the piano, there in his friend's house, as if he were in his own home. After the music was over, someone said to me, "I feel as if I had been in h.e.l.l," so profound was the emotion she had experienced from the playing. I would have said heaven rather than h.e.l.l, for there seemed to be nothing but pure beauty, beauty half asleep and dreaming of itself, in the marvellous playing. A spell, certainly, was over everyone, and then the exorciser became human, and jested deliciously till the early morning, when, as I went home through the still garrulous and peopled streets, I saw the last flutter of flags and streamers between night and dawn. All the world had been rioting for pleasure in the gross way of popular demonstrations; and in the very heart of this up-roar there had been, for a few people, this divine escape.

No less magical, soothing, enchanting was the apparition, in Queen's Hall, ten years later, of this unchanged creature with the tortured Burne-Jones face, level and bewildering eyes, the web of gold hair still poised like a halo. Beauty grew up around him like a sudden, exuberant growth, more vigorous and from a deeper root than before. I realised, more than ever, how the musician had always been the foundation of the virtuoso. I have used the word apparition advisedly. There is something, not only in the aspect of Paderewski, which seems to come mysteriously, but full of light, from a great distance. He startles music into a surprised awakening.

The art of Paderewski recalls to me the art of the most skilled and the most distinguished of equilibrists, himself a Pole, Paul Cinquevalli.

People often speak, wrongly, of Paderewski's skill as acrobatic. The word conveys some sense of disparagement and, so used, is inaccurate.

But there is much in common between two forms of an art in which physical dexterity counts for so much, and that pa.s.sionate precision to which error must be impossible. It is the same kind of joy that you get from Cinquevalli when he juggles with cannon-b.a.l.l.s and from Paderewski when he brings a continuous thunder out of the piano. Other people do the same things, but no else can handle thunder or a cannon-ball delicately. And Paderewski, in his absolute mastery of his instrument, seems to do the most difficult things without difficulty, with a scornful ease, an almost accidental quality which, found in perfection, marvellously decorates it. It is difficult to imagine that anyone since Liszt has had so complete a mastery of every capacity of the piano, and Liszt, though probably even more brilliant, can hardly be imagined with this particular kind of charm. His playing is in the true sense an inspiration; he plays nothing as if he had learned it with toil, but as if it had come to him out of a kind of fiery meditation. Even his thunder is not so much a thing specially cultivated for its own sake as a single prominent detail in a vast accomplishment. When he plays, the piano seems to become thrillingly and tempestuously alive, as if brother met brother in some joyous triumph. He collaborates with it, urging it to battle like a war-horse. And the quality of the sonority which he gets out of it is unlike that which is teased or provoked from the instrument by any other player. Fierce exuberant delight wakens under his fingers, in which there is a sensitiveness almost impatient, and under his feet, which are as busy as an organist's with the pedals. The music leaps like pouring water, flood after flood of sound, caught together and flung onward by a central energy. The separate notes are never picked out and made into ornaments; all the expression goes to pa.s.sage after pa.s.sage, realised acutely in their sequence. Where others give you hammering on an anvil, he gives you thunder as if heard through clouds. And he is full of leisure and meditation, brooding thoughtfully over certain exquisite things as if loth to let them pa.s.s over and be gone. And he seems to play out of a dream, in which the fingers are secondary to the meaning, but report that meaning with entire felicity.

In the playing of the "Moonlight" sonata there was no Paderewski, there was nothing but Beethoven. The finale, of course, was done with the due brilliance, the executant's share in a composition not written for modern players. But what was wonderful, for its reverence, its perfection of fidelity, was the playing of the slow movement and of the little sharp movement which follows, like the crying and hopping of a bird. The ear waited, and was satisfied in every shade of antic.i.p.ation; nothing was missed, nothing was added; the pianist was as it were a faithful and obedient shadow. As you listened you forgot technique, or that it was anybody in particular who was playing: the sonata was there, with all its moonlight, as every lover of Beethoven had known that it existed.

Before the Beethoven there had been a "Variation and Fugue on an original theme," in which Paderewski played his own music, really as if he were improvising it there and then. I am not sure that that feeling is altogether to the credit of the music, which, as I heard it for the first time, seemed almost too perilously effective, in its large contrasts, its Liszt-like succession of contradictory moods. Sound was evoked that it might swell and subside like waves, break suddenly, and die out in a white rain of stinging foam. Pauses, surprises, all were delicately calculated and the weaver of these bewildered dreams seemed to watch over them like a Loge of celestial ingenuity.

When the actual Liszt came, the interminable Sonata in B minor, in which the sugar and the fire are so strangely mixed, it was as if Paderewski were still playing his own music. If ever there was a show piece for the piano, this was it, and if ever there was a divine showman for it, it was Paderewski. You felt at once the personal sympathy of the great pianist for the great pianist. He was no longer reverential, as with Beethoven, not doing homage but taking part, sharing almost in a creation, comet-like, of stars in the sky. Nothing in the bravura disconcerted or even displeased him, no lack of coherence or obviousness in contrasts disturbed him; what was loud, boisterous, explosive, he tossed about as in a colossal game, he bathed luxuriously in what was luscious in the melodies, giving them almost more than their real worth by the delighted skill with which he set them singing. A more astonis.h.i.+ng, a more convincing, a more overwhelming tour de force could hardly be achieved on the piano: could an eruption of Vesuvius be more spectacularly magnificent?

Liszt's music for the piano was written for a pianist who could do anything that has ever been done with the instrument, and the result is not so wholly satisfactory as in the ease of Chopin, who, with a smaller technique, knew more of the secret of music. Chopin never dazzles, Liszt blinds. It is a question if he ever did full justice to his own genius, which was partly that of an innovator, and people are only now beginning to do justice to what was original as well as fine in his work. How many ideas Wagner caught from him, in his shameless transfiguring triumphant way! The melody of the Flower-Maidens, for instance, in "Parsifal," is borrowed frankly from a tone-poem of Liszt in which it is no more than a thin, rocking melody, without any of the mysterious fascination that Wagner put into it. But in writing for the piano Liszt certainly remembered that it was he, and not some unknown person, who was to play these hard and showy rhapsodies, in which there are no depths, though there are splendours. That is why Liszt is the test rather of the virtuoso than of the interpreter, why, therefore, it was so infinitely more important that Paderewski should have played the Beethoven sonata as impersonally as he did than that he should have played the Liszt sonata with so much personal abandonment. Between those limits there seems to be contained the whole art of the pianist, and Paderewski has attained both limits.

After his concert was over, Paderewski gave seven encores, in the midst of an enthusiasm which recurs whenever and wherever he gives a concert.

What is the peculiar quality in this artist which acts always with the same intoxicating effect? Is it anything quite normal in his fingers, or is it, in the image of a brilliant and fantastic writer on music in America, Mr. James Huneker, a soul like the soul of Belus, "the Raphael of the piano," which, "suspended above him, like a coat of many colors,"

mesmerises the audience, while he sits motionless, not touching the notes?

Is Paderewski after all a Belus? Is it his many coloured soul that "magnetises our poor vertebras," in Verlaine's phrase, and not the mere skill of his fingers? Art, it has been said, is contagious, and to compel universal sympathy is to succeed in the last requirements of an art. Of what difference is it whether, like Keats, he perpetuates his personal magnetism in a stanza, or, like Paderewski, sheds it, like a perfume, for that pa.s.sing moment which is all the eternity ever given to the creator of beautiful sounds?

A REFLECTION AT A DOLMETSCH CONCERT

The interpreter of ancient music, Arnold Dolmetsch, is one of those rare magicians who are able to make roses blossom in mid-winter. While music has been modernising itself until the piano becomes an orchestra, and Berlioz requires four orchestras to obtain a pianissimo, this strange man of genius has quietly gone back a few centuries and discovered for himself an exquisite lost world, which was disappearing like a fresco peeling off a wall. He has burrowed in libraries and found unknown ma.n.u.scripts like a savant, he has worked at misunderstood notations and found out a way of reading them like a cryptogrammatist, he has first found out how to restore and then how to make over again harpsichord, and virginals, and clavichord, and all those instruments which had become silent curiosities in museums.

It is only beginning to be realised, even by musical people, that the clavecin music of, for instance, Bach, loses at least half its charm, almost its ident.i.ty, when played on the modern grand piano; that the exquisite music of Rameau and Couperin, the brilliant and beautiful music of Scarlatti, is almost inaudible on everything but the harpsichord and the viols; and that there exists, far earlier than these writers, a ma.s.s of English and Italian music of extreme beauty, which has never been spoiled on the piano because it has never been played on it. To any one who has once touched a spinet, harpsichord, or clavichord, the piano must always remain a somewhat inadequate instrument; lacking in the precision, the penetrating charm, the infinite definite reasons for existence of those instruments of wires and jacks and quills which its metallic rumble has been supposed so entirely to have superseded. As for the clavichord, to have once touched it, feeling the softness with which one's fingers make their own music, like wind among the reeds, is to have lost something of one's relish even for the music of the violin, which is also a windy music, but the music of wind blowing sharply among the trees. It is on such instruments that Mr. Dolmetsch plays to us; and he plays to us also on the lute, the theorbo, the viola da gamba, the viola d'amore, and I know not how many varieties of those stringed instruments which are most familiar to most of us from the early Italian pictures in which whimsical little angels with crossed legs hold them to their chins.

Mr. Dolmetsch is, I suppose, the only living man who can read lute-music and play on the lute, an instrument of extraordinary beauty, which was once as common in England as the guitar still is in Spain. And, having made with his own hands the materials of the music which he has recovered from oblivion, he has taught himself and he has taught others to play this music on these instruments and to sing it to their accompaniment. In a music room, which is really the living room of a house, with viols hanging on the walls, a chamber-organ in one corner, a harpsichord in another, a clavichord laid across the arms of a chair, this music seems to carry one out of the world, and shut one in upon a house of dreams, full of intimate and ghostly voices. It is a house of peace, where music is still that refreshment which it was before it took fever, and became accomplice and not minister to the nerves, and brought the clamour of the world into its seclusion.

Go from a concert at Dolmetsch's to a Tschaikowsky concert at the Queen's Hall. Tschaikowsky is a debauch, not so much pa.s.sionate as feverish. The rus.h.i.+ng of his violins, like the rus.h.i.+ng of an army of large winged birds; the thud, snap, and tingle of his strange orchestra; the riotous image of Russian peasants leaping and hopping in their country dances, which his dance measures call up before one; those sweet solid harmonies in which (if I may quote the voluptuous phrase of a woman) one sets one's teeth as into nougat; all this is like a very material kind of pleasure, in which the senses for a moment forget the soul. For a moment only, for is it not the soul, a kind of discontented crying out against pleasure and pain, which comes back distressingly into this after all pathetic music? All modern music is pathetic; discontent (so much idealism as that!) has come into all modern music, that it may be sharpened and disturbed enough to fix our attention. And Tschaikowsky speaks straight to the nerves, with that touch of unmanliness which is another characteristic of modern art. There is a vehement and mighty sorrow in the Pa.s.sion Music of Bach, by the side of which the grief of Tschaikowsky is like the whimpering of a child. He is unconscious of reticence, unconscious of self-control. He is unhappy, and he weeps floods of tears, beats his breast, curses the daylight; he sees only the misery of the moment, and he sees the misery of the moment as a thing endless and overwhelming. The child who has broken his toy can realise nothing in the future but a pa.s.sionate regret for the toy.

In Tschaikowsky there is none of the quieting of thought. The only healing for our nerves lies in abstract thought, and he can never get far enough from his nerves to look calmly at his own discontent. All those wild, broken rhythms, rus.h.i.+ng this way and that, are letting out his secret all the time: "I am unhappy, and I know not why I am unhappy; I want, but I know not what I want." In the most pa.s.sionate and the most questioning music of Wagner there is always air; Tschaikowsky is suffocating. It is himself that he pities so much, and not himself because he shares in the general sorrow of the world. To Tristan and Isolde the whole universe is an exultant and martyred sharer in their love; they know only the absolute. Even suffering does not bring n.o.bility to Tschaikowsky.

To pa.s.s from Wagner to Tschaikowsky, from "Parsifal" to the Pathetic Symphony, is like pa.s.sing from a church in which priests are offering ma.s.s to a hut in which peasants are quarrelling, dancing, and making love. Tschaikowsky has both force and sincerity, but it is the force and sincerity of a ferocious child. He takes the orchestra in both hands, tears it to pieces, catches up a fragment of it here, a fragment of it there, masters it like an enemy; he makes it do what he wants. But he uses his fist where Wagner touches with the tips of his fingers; he shows ill-breeding after the manners of the supreme gentleman. Wagner can use the whole strength of the orchestra, and not make a noise: he never ends on a bang. But Tschaikowsky loves noise for its own sake; he likes to pound the drum, and to hear the violins running up and down scales like acrobats. Wagner takes his rhythms from the sea, as in "Tristan," from fire, as in parts of the "Ring," from light, as in "Parsifal." But Tschaikowsky deforms the rhythms of nature with the caprices of half-civilised impulses. He puts the frog-like dancing of the Russian peasant into his tunes; he cries and roars like a child in a rage. He gives himself to you just as he is; he is immensely conscious of himself and of his need to take you into his confidence. In your delight at finding any one so alive, you are inclined to welcome him without reserve, and to forget that a man of genius is not necessarily a great artist, and that, if he is not a great artist, he is not a satisfactory man of genius.

I contrast him with Wagner because it seems to me that Wagner, alone among quite modern musicians, and though indeed he appeals to our nerves more forcibly than any of them, has that breadth and universality by which emotion ceases to be merely personal and becomes elemental. To the musicians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, music was an art which had to be carefully guarded from the too disturbing presence of emotion; emotion is there always, whenever the music is fine music; but the music is something much more than a means for the expression of emotion. It is a pattern, its beauty lies in its obedience to a law, it is music made for music's sake, with what might be called a more exclusive devotion to art than that of our modern musician. This music aims at the creation of beauty in sound; it conceives of beautiful sound as a thing which cannot exist outside order and measure; it has not yet come to look upon transgression as an essential part of liberty. It does not even desire liberty, but is content with loving obedience. It can express emotion, but it will never express an emotion carried to that excess at which the modern idea of emotion begins. Thus, for all its suggestions of pain, grief, melancholy, it will remain, for us at least, happy music, voices of a house of peace. Is there, in the future of music, after it has expressed for us all our emotions, and we are tired of our emotions, and weary enough to be content with a little rest, any likelihood of a return to this happy music, into which beauty shall come without the selfishness of desire?

THE DRAMATISATION OF SONG

All art is a compromise, in which the choice of what is to be foregone must be left somewhat to the discretion of nature. When the sculptor foregoes colour, when the painter foregoes relief, when the poet foregoes the music which soars beyond words and the musician that precise meaning which lies in words alone, he follows a kind of necessity in things, and the compromise seems to be ready-made for him.

But there will always be those who are discontented with no matter what fixed limits, who dream, like Wagner, of a possible, or, like Mallarme, of an impossible, fusion of the arts. These would invent for themselves a compromise which has not yet come into the world, a gain without loss, a re-adjustment in which the scales shall bear so much additional weight without trembling. But nature is not always obedient to this too autocratic command. Take the art of the voice. In its essence, the art of the voice is the same in the nightingale and in Melba. The same note is produced in the same way; the expression given to that note, the syllable which that note renders, are quite different things. Song does not in itself require words in order to realise even the utmost of its capacities. The voice is an instrument like the violin, and no more in need of words for its expression than the violin. Perhaps the ideal of singing would be attained when a marvellous voice, which had absorbed into itself all that temperament and training had to give it, sang inarticulate music, like a violin which could play itself. There is nothing which such an instrument could not express, nothing which exists as pure music; and, in this way, we should have the art of the voice, with the least possible compromise.

The compromise is already far on its way when words begin to come into the song. Here are two arts helping one another; something is gained, but how much is lost? Undoubtedly the words lose, and does not the voice lose something also, in its directness of appeal? Add acting to voice and words, and you get the ultimate compromise, opera, in which other arts as well have their share and in which Wagner would have us see the supreme form of art. Again something is lost; we lose more and more, perhaps for a greater gain. Tristan sings lying on his back, in order to represent a sick man; the actual notes which he sings are written partly in order to indicate the voice of a sick man. For the sake of what we gain in dramatic and even theatrical expressiveness, we have lost a two-fold means of producing vocal beauty. Let us rejoice in the gain, by all means; but not without some consciousness of the loss, not with too ready a belief that the final solution of the problem has been found.

An attempt at some solution is, at this moment, being made in Paris by a singer who is not content to be Carmen or Charlotte Corday, but who wants to invent a method of her own for singing and acting at the same time, not as a character in an opera, but as a private interpreter between poetry and the world.

Imagine a woman who suggests at the same time Sarah Bernhardt and Mrs.

Brown-Potter, without being really like either; she is small, exuberantly blonde, her head is surrounded by ma.s.ses of loosely twisted blonde hair; she has large grey eyes, that can be grave, or mocking, or pa.s.sionate, or cruel, or watchful; a large nose, an intent, eloquent mouth. She wears a trailing dress that follows the lines of the figure vaguely, supple to every movement. When she sings, she has an old, high-backed chair in which she can sit, or on which she can lean. When I heard her, there was a mirror on the other side of the room, opposite to her; she saw no one else in the room, once she had surrendered herself to the possession of the song, but she was always conscious of that image of herself which came back to her out of the mirror: it was herself watching herself, in a kind of delight at the beauty which she was evoking out of words, notes, and expressive movement. Her voice is strong and rich, imperfectly trained, but the voice of a born singer; her acting is even more the acting of a born actress; but it is the temperament of the woman that flames into her voice and gestures, and sets her whole being violently and delicately before you. She makes a drama of each song, and she re-creates that drama over again, in her rendering of the intentions of the words and of the music. It is as much with her eyes and her hands, as with her voice, that she evokes the melody of a picture; it is a picture that sings, and that sings in all its lines. There is something in her aspect, what shall I call it?

tenacious; it is a woman who is an artist because she is a woman, who takes in energy at all her senses and gives out energy at all her senses. She sang some tragic songs of Schumann, some mysterious songs of Maeterlinck, some delicate love-songs of Charles van Lerberghe. As one looked and listened it was impossible to think more of the words than of the music or of the music than of the words. One took them simultaneously, as one feels at once the softness and the perfume of a flower. I understood why Mallarme had seemed to see in her the realisation of one of his dreams. Here was a new art, made up of a new mixing of the arts, in one subtly intoxicating elixir. To Mallarme it was the more exquisite because there was in it none of the broad general appeal of opera, of the gross recognised proportions of things.

This dramatisation of song, done by any one less subtly, less completely, and less sincerely an artist, would lead us, I am afraid, into something more disastrous than even the official concert, with its rigid persons in evening dress holding sheets of music in their tremulous hands, and singing the notes set down for them to the best of their vocal ability. Madame Georgette Leblanc is an exceptional artist, and she has made an art after her own likeness, which exists because it is the expression of herself, of a strong nature always in vibration.

What she feels as a woman she can render as an artist; she is at once instinctive and deliberate, deliberate because it is her natural instinct, the natural instinct of a woman who is essentially a woman, to be so. I imagine her always singing in front of a mirror, always recognising her own shadow there, and the more absolutely abandoned to what the song is saying through her because of that uninterrupted communion with herself.

THE MEININGEN ORCHESTRA

Other orchestras give performances, readings, approximations; the Meiningen orchestra gives an interpretation, that is, the thing itself.

When this orchestra plays a piece of music every note lives, and not, as with most orchestras, every particularly significant note. Brahms is sometimes dull, but he is never dull when these people play him; Schubert is sometimes tame, but not when they play him. What they do is precisely to put vitality into even those parts of a composition in which it is scarcely present, or scarcely realisable; and that is a much more difficult thing, and really a more important thing, for the proper appreciation of music, than the heightening of what is already fine, and obviously fine in itself. And this particular quality of interpretation has its value too as criticism. For, while it gives the utmost value to what is implicitly there, there at least in embryo, it cannot create out of nothing; it cannot make insincere work sincere, or fill empty work with meaning which never could have belonged to it. Brahms, at his moments of least vitality, comes into a new vigour of life; but Strauss, played by these sincere, precise, thoughtful musicians shows, as he never could show otherwise, the distance at which his lively spectre stands from life. When I heard the "Don Juan," which I had heard twice before, and liked less the second time than the first, I realised finally the whole strain, pretence, and emptiness of the thing. Played with this earnest attention to the meaning of every note, it was like a trivial drama when Duse acts it; it went to pieces through being taken at its own word. It was as if a threadbare piece of stuff were held up to the full sunlight; you saw every st.i.tch that was wanting.

The "Don Juan" was followed by the Entr'acte and Ballet music from "Rosamunde," and here the same sunlight was no longer criticism, but rather an illumination. I have never heard any music more beautifully played. I could only think of the piano playing of Pachmann. The faint, delicate music just came into existence, breathed a little, and was gone. Here for once was an orchestra which could literally be overheard.

The overture to the "Meistersinger" followed, and here, for the first time, I got, quite flawless and uncontradictory, the two impressions which that piece presents to one simultaneously. I heard the unimpeded march forward, and I distinguished at the same time every delicate impediment thronging the way. Some renderings give you a sense of solidity and straightforward movement; others of the elaborate and various life which informs this so solid structure. Here one got the complete thing, completely rendered.

I could not say the same of the rendering of the overture to "Tristan."

Here the notes, all that was so to speak merely musical in the music, were given their just expression; but the something more, the vast heave and throb of the music, was not there. It was "cla.s.sical" rendering of what is certainly not "cla.s.sical" music. Hear that overture as Richter gives it, and you will realise just where the Meiningen orchestra is lacking. It has the kind of energy which is required to render Beethoven's mult.i.tudinous energy, or the energy which can be heavy and cloudy in Brahms, or like overpowering light in Bach, or, in Wagner himself, an energy which works within known limits, as in the overture to the "Meistersinger." But that wholly new, and somewhat feverish, overwhelming quality which we find in the music of "Tristan" meets with something less than the due response. It is a quality which people used to say was not musical at all, a quality which does not appeal certainly to the musical sense alone: for the rendering of that we must go to Richter.

Otherwise, in that third concert it would he difficult to say whether Schumann, Brahms, Mozart, or Beethoven was the better rendered. Perhaps one might choose Mozart for pure pleasure. It was the "Serenade" for wind instruments, and it seemed, played thus perfectly, the most delightful music in the world. The music of Mozart is, no doubt, the most beautiful music in the world. When I heard the serenade I thought of Coventry Patmore's epithet, actually used, I think, about Mozart: "glittering peace." Schumann, Brahms, Wagner, and Beethoven all seemed for the moment to lose a little of their light under this pure and tranquil and unwavering "glitter." I hope I shall never hear the "Serenade" again, for I shall never hear it played as these particular players played it.

The Meiningen orchestra is famous for its wind, and when, at the first concert, I heard Beethoven's Rondino for wind instruments, it seemed to me that I was hearing bra.s.s for the first time as I had imagined bra.s.s ought to sound. Here was, not so much a new thing which one had never thought possible, as that precise thing which one's ears had expected, and waited for, and never heard. One quite miraculous thing these wind players certainly did, in common, however, with the whole orchestra. And that was to give an effect of distance, as if the sound came actually from beyond the walls. I noticed it first in the overture to "Leonore,"

the first piece which they played; an unparalleled effect and one of surprising beauty.

Another matter for which the Meiningen orchestra is famous is its interpretation of the works of Brahms. At each concert some fine music of Brahms was given finely, but it was not until the fourth concert that I realised, on hearing the third Symphony, everything of which Brahms was capable. It may be that a more profound acquaintance with his music would lead me to add other things to this thing as the finest music which he ever wrote; but the third Symphony certainly revealed to me, not altogether a new, but a complete Brahms. It had all his intellect and something more; thought had taken fire, and become a kind of pa.s.sion.