CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY MUSIC 3 1924 022 165 868 Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022165868 Music After the Great War Music After the Great War AND OTHER STUDIES BY CARL VAN VECHTEN ,,,xm\ NEW YORK ^s*^^^'') G. Schirmer^^);;::' V/. MCMXV f t>- "^((f FOR FANIA Contents PAGE Music Aftee the Geeat Wae .... 1 Music fok Museums? 27 The Secret of the Russian Ballet . . 45 Igoe Steawinsky: A New Composee . . 83 Massenet and Women 119 Stage Decoeation as a Fine Aet . . . 137 Adolphe Appia and Goedon Ceaig . . . 169 Music After the Great War Music After the Great War WHEN the great war was declared, Leo Stein, in Florence at €he time, asserted that the day of the cubists, the futurists, and their ilk was at an end. "After the war," he said, "there will be no more of this nonsense. Ma- tisse may survive, and Picasso in his 'early man- ner,' but Renoir and Cezanne are the last of the great painters, and it is on their work that the new art, wihatever it may be, wiU be founded." Leo Stein belongs to a family which, in a sense, has stood sponsor for the new painters, but his remarks can scarcely be called disinterested, as his Villa di Doccia in Florence contains no paintings at pres- ent but those of Renoir and Cezanne. There are mostly Renoirs. Of course a general remark like this in regard to painting is based on an idea that there is no connection — at least no legitimate connection — ^be- tween the painting of Marcel Duchamp, Gleizes, Derain, Picabia, and the later work of Picasso, and the painters (completely legitimatized by now) who came before them. Without arguing this miscon- ception, it may be stated that a similar misconcep- [3] Music After the Great War tion exists in relation to "modem" music. There are those who feel that the steady line of progres- sion from Bach, through Beethoven and Brahms, has broken off somewhere. The exact point of de- parture is not agreed upon. Some say that music as an art ended with Richard Wagner's death. There are only a few, however, who do not include Brahms and Tschaikowsky in the list of those graced with the crown of genius. There are many who are generous enough to believe that Richard Strauss and Claude Debussy have carried on the divine torch. But there are only a few discerning enough to perceive that Strawinsky and Schoen- berg have gone only a step further than the so- called impressionists in music. Since the beginnings of music, as an art-form,' there has always been a complaint that contem- porary composers could not write melody. Beet- hoven suffered from this complaint; Wagner suf- fered from it ; we have only recently gone through the period when Strauss and Debussy suffered from it. The reason is an obvious one. Each new composer has made his own rules of composi- tion. Each has progressed a step further in his use of harmony. Now it is evident that in this [4] Music After the Great War way novelty lies, for an entirely new unaccom- panied melody would be difficult to devise. It is in the combination of melody and harmony that a composer may show his talent at invention. It is but natural thait any advance in this direction should at first startle unaccustomed ears, and it is by no means uncertain that this first thrill is not the most delicious sensation to be derived from hearing music. In time harmony is exhausted — combinations of notes in ordered forms — but there is still the pursuit of disharmony to be made. We are aU quite accustomed to occasional discords, even in the music of Beethoven, where they occur very frequently. Strauss utilizes discords skil- fully in his tonal painting ; in such works as Elek- tra and Heldenleben they abound. The newer com- posers have almost founded a school on disharmony. To me it seems certain that it is the men who have given the new impetus to tonal art in the past five years who will make the opening for what- ever art-music we are to hear after the war, and I am referring even to occasional pieces after the manner of Tschaikowsky's overture, 1812, in which the Russian National Anthem' puts to rout the ■Marseillaise. . . . Perhaps it will be Karol [5] Music After the Great War Szymanowski of Poland (if he is still alive) or a new Cesar Franck in Belgium who will rise to write of the intensity of suffering through which his country has struggled. But it seems to me beyond a doubt that music after the great war will be "newer" (I mean, of course, more primitive) than it was in the last days of July, 1914!. There will be plenty of disharmonies, foreshadowed by Schoen- berg and Strawinsky, let loose on our ears, but, in spite of the protests of Mr. Runciman, I submit that these disharmonies are a steady progression from Wagner, and not a freakish whim of an ab- normal devil. I do not predict a return to Mozart as one result of the war. There are always those prone to believe that such a war as is now in progress has been brought about by an anarchic condition among the artists, as foohsh a theory as one could well promulgate, and keep one's mental balance. It is this group which steadfastly maintains that, after the war, things will be not merely as they were immediately before the war broke out, but as they were fifty years before. Now, it should be apparent to any- one but the oldest inhabitant that the music dramas of Richard Wagner are aging rapidly. Public in- [6] Music After the Great War terest in them is on the decline, thanks to an ab- surd recognition, in some degree or other, every- where from Bayreuth to Paris, from Madrid to New York, of what is known as the "Master's tra- dition." Some of this tradition has been invented by Frau Cosima Liszt von Biilow Wagner and all of it is guaranteed to put the Wagner plays rapidly in a class with the operas of Donizetti and Bellini, stalking horses for prima donnas trained in a certain school. Without going into particulars which would clog this issue, it may be stated that the tradition includes matters pertain- ing to scenery, staging, lighting, acting, sing- ing, and even tempi in the orchestra. It is all-in- clusive. It must have been quite evident to even the casual concert-goer that German music has passed its zenith. It has had its day and it is not likely that post-bellum music will be Germanic. In an article in a recent number of "The Musical Quarterly," Edgar Istel reviews German opera since Wagner with a consistent tone of depreciation. The sub- ject, of course, does not admit of enthusiasm. He calls Edmund Kretzschmer and Karl Goldmark "the compromise composers." There are probably [7] Music After the Great War not many Americans who have heard of the for- mer or his "most successful opera," Die Folkwnger, Goldmark is better known to us, but we do not ex- aggerate the importance of Die Konigin von Saba, the Sahuntala overture, or Die Idndliche Hochzeit symphony. Nor do we foreigners to the Vaterland know much about Victor Nessler's Der Trompeter von Sakkingen, although we hear one air from it frequently at Sunday night concerts in the opera house. August Bungert tried to outdo Wagner with a six-day opera cycle, Homerische Welt, pro- duced in 1898-1903 and already forgotten. Max Schillings, whose name has occasionally figured on symphony orchestra programmes in America, is thus dismissed by Istel : "Schillings' last work, Der Moloch (1906), proves his total inability as a dra- matic composer." Hans Pfitzner is another name on which we need not linger. Engelbert Humper- dinck, of course, wrote the one German opera which has had a world-wide and continuous success since Parsifal — Hansel wnd Gretel. But the music he has composed since then has not awakened much enthusiasm. Hansel und Gretel is, after all, folk- music with Wagnerian orchestration. It assuredly is not from Humperdinck that we can look for post- [8] Music After the Great War bellum music. We have heard Kienzl's very medi- ocre Der Kuhreigen and we have been promised a hearing of Evangelvmann. The name of Siegfried Wagner signifies nothing. Ludwig Thuille wrote some very interesting music in the last act of Ldbetanz, but that opera could not hold the stage at the Metropolitan Opera House. W. von Walters- hausen's Oberst Chabert has been given in Lon- don, not, however, with conspicuous success. D' Al- bert has written many German operas in spite of his Scotch birth. Of these the best is Tiefland, negligible in regarding the future. Leo Blech's unimportant Versiegelt gave pleasure in Berlin for a time. Wolf -Ferrari, one of the most gifted of the German composers, is half Italian. His work, of course, is not notable for originality of treat- ment. Suzcmnen's Geheimniss is very like an old Italian or Mozart opera. So is Le Donne Curiose. His cantata. Vita Nuova, is archaic in tone, a mu- sical Cimabue or Giotto. I Giojelli della Madonna is an attempt at Italian verismo. Richard Strauss ! the most considerable German musical figure of his time. His operas will still be given after the war and his tone-poems will be heard, but he has done his part in furthering the progress of art music. [9] Music After the Great War He has nothing more to say. In The Legend of Joseph, the ballet which the Russians gave in Paris last summer, it was to be observed that the Strauss idiom exploited therein had fully expressed itself in the earlier works of this composer. Salome and Elehtra represent Strauss's best dramatic work, and Don Juan and TiU Eulenspiegel are, perhaps, his best tone-poems. Bachard Strauss, however, is assuredly not post-bellum. His music is a part of the riches of the past. One can easily pass rapidly by the names of Bruckner, Weingartner, and Gustav Mahler. Max Reger, I think, is not a great composer. BW there are two Austrian names on which we must linger. One of them is Eiich Korngold, the boy com- poser, who is now eighteen years old. His earlier work, such as the ballet, Der Schneemann, sounds hke Puccini with false notes. It is pretty music. Later, Korngold developed a fancy for writing Strauss and Reger with false notes. And he is still in process of development. What he may do cannot be entirely foreseen, Arnold Schoenberg is another matter. He is stiU using as propaganda music which he wrote many years ago. No public has yet caught up [10] Music After the Great War with his present output. That is an excellent sign that his music is of the future. The string sextet, VerJelarte Nacht, which the Kneisel Quartet played more than once in the season just past, dates from 1899. The string quartets were written in 1906 and 1908. The five orchestral pieces, the six piano pieces, and Pierrot Lunaire, other music of his on whidi what fame he possesses outside of Austria rests, are all over two years old. Now the Boston Symphony Orchestra has only recently deemed it fitting to play the five orchestral pieces, and I be- lieve the piano pieces received their first pubUc per- formance in New York at one of the concerts given by Leo Omstein, although several pianists, notably Charles Henry Cooper aond Mrs. Arensberg, had played them in private. In 1911 Schoenberg issued his quite extraordi- nary "Handbuch der Harmonielehre," which is one of the best evidences that, even though the com- poser dies in the war, others will follow to carry on the torch from the point where he dropped it. Yes, Schoenberg, no less than Henri Matisse, is a torch-bearer in the art race. He is a stone in the architecture of music — and not an accidental decoration. [11] Music After the Great War May I quote a few passages from the "Hand- buch"? "The artist does not do what others find beau- tiful, but what he finds himself bound to do." "If anyone feels dissatisfied with his time, let it not be because that time is no longer the good old time, but because it is not yet the new and better time, the future." "Though I refrain from overprizing originality, I cannot help valuing novelty at its full worth. Novelty is the imiprovement toward which we are drawn as irresistibly, as unwittingly, as towards the future. It may prove to be a splendid better- ment, or to be deaAh — ^but also the certainty of a higher hfe after death. Yes, the future brings with it the novel and the unknown ; and therefore, not without excuse, we often hold what is novel to be identical with what is good and beautiful." With the single exception just noted it is not from the German countries that the musical inven- tion of the past two decades has come. It is from France. Whether Debussy or Erik Satie or Fa- nelli first developed the use of the whole-tone scale is unimportant ; they have all been writing in Paris. Erik Satie is one of the precursors of a move- [12] Music After the Great War ment — ^not important in himself, but of immense importance as an indication. He is not a genius, and therefore his work has received little attention and has had no great influence. But it must be remembered that he was bom in 1860 and that his Gymnopedies and Gnossiermes, composed respec- tively in 1888 and 1890, make a free use of the whole-tone scale and other harmonic innovations ordinarily attributed to Debussy. A Sardbemde, written in 1887, should be tried on your piano. It will certainly startle you. Satie has recently achieved a little notoriety, thanks to Debussy and Ravel, who have dragged his music into the light. The more dramatic resurrection of Fanelli by Gabriel Pierne has been related too often to need retelling here. Debussy, beyond question, is one of the high- water marks in the history of music. L'Apres-midi d'lm Faune is certainly post-Wagnerian in a sense tha* Salome is not. Maurice Ravel, Paul Dukas, Roger-Ducasse, Florent Sohmitt, Chausson, Cha- brier, and Charpentier are all revolutionists in a greater or less degree, and all of them are direct descendants of the great French composers who came before them. But what has been accomplished [13] Music After the Great War in France in the last few years ? Dukas has written nothing important since Ariane et Barbe-Bleue. Debussy's recent works are not epoch-making: a makeshift ballet, Jeux, a few piano pieces; what else? Ravel's ballet, Daphnis et Chloe, is lovely music. Some people profess to find pleasure in lis- tening to Schmitt's Salome. It is unbearable to me, danced or undanced. Vincent d'Indy — has he written a vibrant note since Istar? Charpentier's Julien — a rehash of Louise. It sounds some fifty years older, except the carnival scene. There is live futurist music in that last act. When Char- pentier painted street noises on his tonal canvas, were they of night or morning, he knew his busi- ness. But certainly not a post-bellum composer, this. Charpentier will never compose another stir- ring phrase; that is written in the sitars. Since Pelleas et Milisande and Ariane et Barbe-Bleue, is there one French opera which can be called great? There are two very good ones, Raoul Laparra's La Habanera and Maurice Ravel's I'Heure Espa- gnole, and very many bad ones, such as Massenet's Don Quichotte, the unbelievable Qvx) Vadis? of Jean Nougues, and the imitative and meaningless Manna Vanna of Fevrier. I do not think it is from [14] Music After the Great War France that we may expect the post-bellum music. Italy, long the land of opera, has held her place in the singing theatres. Verdi and Puccini still dominate the opera houses. But Puccini's work is accomplished. His popularity is waning, as the comparative failure of The Girl of the Golden West will testify. You will find the germ of all that is best in Puccini in Manon Lescaut, an early work. After that there is repetition and misdirec- tion of energy, gradually diffused talent. It does not seem necessary to speak of Mascagni and Leon- cavallo. They have both tried for so long a time to repeat their two successes and tried in vain. Cdlea, Franchetti, Catalani, and Giordano — these names are almost forgotten already. Is Sgam- bati dead.'' Does anyone know whether he is or not .'' Zandonai — ah, there's a name to linger on ! Watch out for Zandonai in the vanguard of the post-bellum composers. Save him from the wax- maw. His Conchita disclosed a great talent ; that opera shimmered with the hot atmiosphere of Spain, a bestial, lazy Spain. This work I place with De- bussy's Iberia as one of the great tonal pictures of Spain. I have not heard Zandonai's opera, Franr [15] Music After the Great War cesca da Rimini, which was produced at Covent Garden Opera House last summer, but I have been told that its beauties are many. I hope we may hear it in New York. Pratella is one of Marinetti's group of futurists, one of the noise-makers. I am not so sure of Pratella as I am sure that many of his theories will be more successfully exploited by some one else. Spain has been heard from recently — Spain, which has lacked a composer of "art music." Al- beniz and others have been writing piano music and now we are promised a one-act opera by Granados. Perhaps in time Spain may lift her head high and tinkle her castanets to some purpose, on pro- grammes devoted to her own composers. Btit now it is Bizet, Chabrier, Debussy, Laparra, and Zan- donai who have perverted these castanets and tam- bourines to their own uses. I am no admirer of modem English music. I take less pleasure in hearing a piece by Sir Edward Elgar than I do in a mediocre performance of Le Prophete — and I assure you that Meyerbeer is not my favorite composer. A meaner skill than Sir Edward's, perhaps, hes in Irving Berlin's fingers, but a greater genius. I once spent a most fright- [16] Music After the Great War ful afternoon — at least nearly all of an afternoon — ^listening to Elgar's violin concerto, and I re- member a dreadfully dull sjnnphony, that sounded as if it were played on a throbbing organ at ves- pers in a dark church on a hot Sunday afternoon. The Cockaigne overture is more to my taste, al- though I think it no great achievement. Has there been a real composer in Britannia since Sir Arthur Sullivan, whose works one rehears with a pleasure akin to ecstasy? I do not think so. Cyril Scott is interesting. Holbrooke, Delius, Grainger, Wal- lace, and Bantock write much complex music for the orchestra, to say nothing of piano pieces, songs, and operas. (Holbrooke supplements his labors in this direction with the writing of articles for "The English Review" and other periodicals, in which he complains bitterly that the English composer is without honor in his own country.) I find Scott's piano pieces better. But since R Barbiere di Siviglia and Le Nozze di Figaro there have been but few comic scores comparable to Patience. You will hear the Sullivan operas many times after the war, but one cannot think of founding a school u^on them, ^ I shall not hesitate on the music of America, be- Music After the Great War cause in a country that has no ante-bellum music — one cannot speak with too great enthusiasm of Ethelbert Nevin and Edward MacDoweU — there is no immediate promise of important development. However, in a digression, I should like to make a few remarks on the subject of the oft-repeated charge, re-echoed by Holbrooke in relation to Brit- ish musicians, that American composers are ne- glected and have no chance for a hearing in their own country. Has ever a piano piece been played more often or sold more copies than MacDoweU's To 'a Wild Rose, unless it be Nevin's Narcissus? Probably The Rosary has 'been sung more times in more quarters of the globe than Rule Britannia. Other American songs which have achieved an in- ternational success and a huge sale are At Parting, A Maid Sings Light, From the Land of the Sky- blue Water, and The Year's at the Spring. Or- ' chestral works by Paine, Hadley, Converse, and others, are heard almost as soon as they are com- posed, and many of them are heard more than once, played by more than one orchestra. Of late years it has been the custom to produce an Amer- ican work each season at the Metropolitan Opera House, a custom fortunately abandoned during the [18] Music After the Great War season just past. No, it cannot be said that the American composer has been neglected. Finland has presented us with Sibelius, whose latest works indicate that Helsingfors may have something to say about the 'trend of tone after the war, and from Poland Karol Szymanowski has sent forth some strange and appeaKng songs. But it is to Russia, after all, I think, that we must turn for the inspiration, and a great deal of the execution, of our post-bellum music. For- tunately for us, we have not yet delved very deeply into the past of Russian music, in spite of reports to the contrary. Mr. Gatti-Casazza once assured nie that Boris Godimow was the only Russian opera which stood any chance of success in America. He has doubtless revised his feeling on the subject, since he has announced Prince Igor for production ' this season, an opera which should be greeted with very warm enthusiasm, if the producers give any decent amount of attention to the very important baUet. It is interesting, in turning to Russian hterature, to discover that Turgenev in the middle of the nineteenth century was writing a masterpiece like "A Sportsman's Sketches," a work full of reserve [19] Music After the Great War and primitive force, and a strange oharm. And Turgenev was bom and bred a gentleman in the sense that Thackeray was bom and bred a gentle- man. In English literature we have travelled com- pletely around the circle, through the artificial, the effete, and the sentimental, to the natural, the forceful, the primitive. Art like that of D. H. Lawrence, George Moore, and Theodore Dreiser is very much abroad in the lands. Russia began her circle only in the last century with her splen- didly barbaric school of writers who touch the soil at every point, the soil and the soul: Turgenev, Gogol, Pushkin, Dostoievsky, Andreyev, Tolstoy, Tchekhov, Gorky, and Artzybachev, a noble group of names. We find in Russia a situation very akin to that of Ireland, a people commercially under- developed, in a large measure bom to suffering, keenly alive to artistic impulse. In Ireland this impulse has expressed itself al- most entirely through the written word, but in Russia it has found an outlet in a thousand chan- nels. (The arts have grouped themselves together in the glowing splendor of the Russian Ballet pro- ductions.) Music, hke literature, sprang into be- ing in Russia, fed on the rich folk-songs of the [201 Music After the Great War Slavic races, during the nineteenth century; and again like Russian literature, its first baby notes were wild, appealing, barbaric, forceful, and sin- cere — the music of the steppes and the people, rather than the music of the drawing-room and the nobility. Let us remember that about the time Richard Wagner was writing Tristan und Isolde, Moussorgsky was putting on paper, with infinite pain, the notes of the scores of the poignant Boris Godunow and the intense La Khovanckma, Since then the Russian music world has been occupied by men who have given their lives to the foundation of a national school. Their work has been largely overshadowed in America by the facile genius of Tscbaikowsky, who wrote the most popular sym- phony of the nineteenth century, but who is less Russian and less important than many of his con- freres. If for a time after the war one must turn to the past for operatic novelties, one can do no better than to go to Russia. It is my firm conviction that several of the Russian operas would have a real success here. La Khovanchma to many musicians is more beautiful than Boris. It is indeed a serious work of genius. The chorus with which the first [21] Music After the Great War act closes has power enough to entice me to the theatre at any time. I do not know of a death- scene in all the field of opera as strong in its ef- fect as that of the Prince Ivan Khovansky. He is stabbed and he falls dead. He does not sing again, he does not move ; there are no throbs of the violin^, no drum beats. There is a pause. The orchestra is silent. The people on the stage are still. It is tremendous ! Rimsky-Korsakow's music is pretty well known in America. His Scheherazade and Antar suites are played very often; but his operas remain un- sung here. Why.'' He wrote some sixteen of them before he died. Even so early a work as A Night in May contains many lovely pages. It is a folk- song opera built along the old lines of set numbers. It reminds one of The Bartered Bride. First pro- duced in 1880, it does not show its age. The Snow Maiden contains the Song of the Shepherd Lehl and one or two other airs familiar in the concert reper- toire. Sadko, if given in the Russian manner, would fill any opei-a house for two performances a week for the season ; and Ivam the Terrible is a masterpiece of its kind. But the greatest of them all is the last lyric drama of the composer, The [ 22 ] Music After the Great War Golden Cock, in which this great tone colorist bent his ear further towards the future than he had ever done before. The death of Alexander Scriabine recently in Petrograd created little comment, although the papers had been filled a few weeks before with de- scriptions of the very bad performance of his Prometheus by the Russian Symphony Orchestra. Scriabine, another Gordon Craig, was too great a theorist, too concerned with the perfect in his art, ever to arrive at anything approximating the ac- tual. As an influence, he can already be felt. His synchronism of music, light, and perfumes was never realized in his own music, although the Rus- sian Ballet has completely realized it. (How cleverly that organization — or is it a movement.'' — has seized everybody's good ideas, from Wagner's to Adolphe Appia's!) As for Scriabine's strange scales and disharmonies, Igor Strawinsky has made the best use of them — Igor Strawinsky, perhaps the greatest of the musicians of the immediate fu- ture. I hope Americans may hear his wonderfully beautiful opera. The Nightingale; and if all the music of the future is like that, I stand with bowed and reverent head before the music of the future [23] Music After the Great War (with the mental reservation, however, that I may spurn it when it is no longer music of the future). His three ballets are also works of genius. It is indeed to Strawinsky, whose strange har- monies evoked new fairy worlds in The Nightingale and whose barbaric rhythms stirred the angry pulses of a Paris audience threatened with the shame of an emotion in the theatre, to whom we may turn, perhaps, for still new thrills after the war. Strawinsky has so far showed his growth in every new work he has vouchsafed the public. From Schoenberg, and Komgold in a lesser de- gree, we may hope for messages in tone, dishar- monic by nature, and with a complexity of rhythm so complex that it becomes simple. (In this con- nection I should like to say that there are scarcely two consecutive bars in Strawinsky's ballet, The Sacrifice to the Spring, written in the same time- signature, and yet I know of no music — I do not even except Alexander's Ragtime Band — ^more dance-compelling.) We may pray to Karol Szy- manowski for futurist wails from ruined Poland ; a rearranged, disharmonic version of the national airs of the warring countries may spring from France or Italy ; but for the new composers, the new [24] Music After the Great War names, the strong, new blood of the immediate future in music, we must turn to Russia. The new music will not come from England, certainly not from America, not from France, nor from Ger- many, but from the land of the steppes — a gradual return to that orientalism in style which may be one of the gifts of culture, which an invasion from the Far East may impose on us some time in the next century. June, 1916. [251 Music for Museums? Music for Museums? I SAW people actually enjoying themselves at a recent piano recital. During the per- formance of some of the numbers they laughed; at other times they nudged one another and made comments. The conclusion of each piece was punctuated by a certain amount of vociferous applause, and an almost equal amount of disappro- bation. One group of pieces on the programme, Claude Debussy's Children's Comer, was familiar; as a result, it aroused less interest than some of the other music played. Albeniz, one of the new men who is making the list of Spanish compositions extend beyond the folk-song, was represented by his El Albaicm; Maurice Ravel by Gaspard de la Nuit, a very successful attempt to paint atmo- sphere and character in the very limited tonal medium of the pianoforte ; Scriabine by four pre- ludes and a sonata ; and Leo Omstein, the pianist, by Seven Sketches and Two Shadow Pieces. Mr. Ornstein's compositions have no truck with majors and minors, thirds and fifths, pentatonic and dia- tonic scales. His descending fingers strike masses of keys ; some auditors seemed to think there is no [29] Music for Museums? plan in these assaults on the board. Personally, I am willing to wager that the last piano so- natas of the deaf Beethoven meant just as little to their first hearers. We have become accustomed to the sweet and unsubtle way of the tonic and dominant. Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Strawin- sky are yet discordant to our melody-soaked and harmony-demanding ears. Yet, if concert programmes are consulted, one will find in them very little music earlier than the eighteenth century. The symphony orchestra is really a discovery of the nineteenth century. When our symphony orchestras play Bach, Haydn, or Mozart, the reenforcements, the rearrangements, would astonish those old composers as much as the electric signs on Broadway, could they be brought back to hear them. Either one-half the band — nay, two-thirds — must sit still during the playing of these numbers, if the original body of tone is to be preserved, or else some readjustment is necessary. For instance, it is quite customary to allow the full body of strings to play a Mozart symphony, although the wood-winds and brasses are not appreciably greater in number in the mod- em orchestra than they were in Mozart's time. [30] Music for Museums? Lack of* proportion and over-emphasis are the natural results. It is only the composers who have invented the modem orchestra, BerUoz, Liszt, Wagner, Strauss, Reger, Strawinsky and Scriabine — ^to mention a few names — ^who get justice done to iiheir compo- sitions. In fact, as it stands, the modem orchestra exists for the perfect playing of modem music. It is a dizzy, vertiginous force; floods of sound are let loose on the hearer to drown his sensibilities and to make him "feel." Now, there was something very precise and exact and prim about the peruked band of the day of Haydn, which would have played the Symphonie Pathetique as if it were the Marche Funebre d'une Mariormette. Music in the good old days did not cause women to swoon and men to swear. There were no Wagnerites then. (Are there any now?) The composer of Armide would not have inspired an Aubrey Beardsley draw- ing. So when the modem orchestra plays Mozart it makes just a little too much of it. Mozart and Strauss ! It is the difference between Cimabue and Michael Angelo. The conflict between periodic conventions and contemporary methods and tastes is always great [31] Music for Museums? and will always serve as an excuse for - portunities to M. Reynaldo Hahn as to MM. Bakst and Fokine, who are responsible for the pictorial and choreographic sides of the ballet. The theme associated with the god is the most striking. The dance with the peacocks is attractive, there are some beautiful moments when the young girl ap- peals to her lover, and their duet of joy at the end is spirited, but much of the music is lacking in character and the energy of the dance. It is writ- ten with the beautifully clear technique to which [69] The Secret of the Russian Ballet M. Hahn has accustomed us, but there is little driving force in it, and not a touch of passion in the scenes where passion is wanted to give con- trast to the personal movements of the crowd or the calm atmosphere of the divinities." Le Pavilion d'Armide is a graceful combination of two picturesque periods of romantic art, for a French Vicomte, storm-stayed on his travels, is offered hospitality by a Marquis, who lodges him in a pavilion of his castle, where the Gobelin tapes- try comes to life during the night. The whole thing is, of course, a dream, in which the Vicomte sees in the Magician of the tapestry the person of his host, and himself plays the part of Rinaldo (the characters are those of Quinault's play set to music by LuUi and Gluck). When the change comes and Armida and her court come to life, what really comes to life is the court of Versailles ; here is the Grand Monarque himself, and there the most enchanting group of knights in pink with feather head-dresses dance with ladies whose costumes combine the grace of Watteau with the conven- tional dancing-skirt with the happiest results. In the dances from Prince Igor, accompanied by a chorus, the Russians loosen their restraint to a [70] The Secret of t he Russian Ballet degree which would mean a totally unrestrained performance in the hands of another group of dancers. It is almost impossible to believe, after witnessing these wild Polovtsian dances, that the action has been perfectly ordered by Fokine and can be repeated exactly at any time. The ballet occupies almost all of the fourth act of Boro- dine's opera. I believe that the choruses to w'hich these dances are performed were sung at a con- cert of the MacDowell Chorus in Carnegie Hall, March 3, 1911. The New York Winter Garden once utilized the music for a ballet. The scene used by the Russians, painted by Roerich, is mar- velously suggestive of barbarism; the now lan- guorous, now passionate music, pulsing with rhythm, is admirably adapted to dancing. Us- ually Mme. Fokina and Bolm are seen in these dances, but it is the ballet corps itself which be- comes the important feature in their success. "How excellently," says one foreign critic, "every means that the theatre offers has been made use of to produce the desired effect ; the menace of the coming cloud of barbarians that is to lie for centuries on the desolate face of Russia (for we are in the camp of the Polovtsians, forerunners of the [71] The Secret of the Russian Ballet great invasion) ; not the loud blustering of a Tam- burlaine the Great, but the awful, quiet vigor, half melancholy, half playful, of a tribe that is but a little unit in the swarm ; the infinite^ horizons of the steppe, with the line of the buried tumuli stretching away to endless times and places, down the centuries into Siberia; the long-drawn, re- signed, egoless music (Borodine drew his themes from real Tartar-Mongol sources); the women that crouch, unconscious of themselves, or rise and stretch lazy limbs, and in the end fling themselves carelessly prone when their dance is over; the sav- age-joyful panther leaping of the men ; the stamp- ing feet and quick, nerve-racking beat of the drum ; and more threatening than all, the gambolling of the boys, like kittens unwittingly preparing them- selves for the future chase." But whose is the guiding hand, the hand that combines the rhythms, the colors, and the human element in these works? It is Fokine's; without Fokine I do not see very well how these ballets could come into existence. (I am now speaking of Fokine, of course, entirely as a producer. He is also known as a dancer. One must bear in mind, also, that Nijinsky's three ballets — ^he contrived [72] The Secret of the Russian Ballet the action for VAprh-midi d'un Fawne, Jeux, and The Sacri^e to the Spring — were very original and effective.) Until Fokine began to work, the ballet-master had been content to arrange all his coryphees in straight lines across the stage, each dancer making the same simultaneous movement as her neighbor. Fokine divined the ineffective- ness of this false symmetry. He divided his forces into many groups, each group a unit in movement. (The ultimate result of the application of this principle was Nijinsky's staging of The Sacrifice to the Spring, in which each dancer was set a sepa- rate simultaneous task.) Nor did Fokine allow any one group of dancers the whole of any move- ment in the music. He subdivided the movements into phrases. He really divided his ballet into choirs, just as Richard Strauss and Reger sub- divided the orchestra, in which, in the time of Bellini and Donizetti, large bodies of the strings used to play in unison. Then each choir was given certain phrases to interpret, some in the back- ground, some in the foreground, until the poly- phony of the music was perfectly synchronized with the action of the ballet. Many of the ideas for Fokine's ballets were derived from pictures. It is [73] The Secret of the Russian Ballet possible to see at once the pictorial resemblance between The Legend of Joseph and Veronese's The Marriage at Coma, or between Midas and Mantegna's Parnasse in the Louvre. But Fokine also learned how to control movement, and how to preserve balance from pictures. In the Accademia di B'elle Arti in Venice there is a room devoted to large paintings by Gentile Bellini and Vittore Car- paccio, depicting events in Venetian history. In one of them is a procession, and a study of the different groups of marchers and bystanders will give you an excellent idea of the effective and pic- torial intricacy of a Fokine ballet. In The Legend of Joseph Fokine attains one of his most thrilling effects in the last scene, where the handmaidens of the refused Potiphar's wife, clad in black gauze, with bare arms and legs, wave their arms, in a frenzy of hysterical disdain at the offending Jo- seph. Shortly after seeing the ballet, in walking through the Egyptian rooms of the British Mu- seum, I came across an Egyptian fresco which al- most seemed to me at first, in the exact spirit in which Fokine had caught its feeling, to be a photograph of the action I had seen on the stage. [74] The Secret of the Russian Ballet Russians are natural dancers. It is said that only Russians and Poles can learn to do the ma- zurka properly, in which the women engage in that peculiar ghding step which someone characterized as the definite expression of Meredith's phrase, "gliding women." So, under the guidance of Fo- kine, with the inspiration which such music and color as are provided for them can give, the Rus- sians engaged in the carrying out of these ballets easily rise to an unattainable (for other dancers) height of seeming spontaneity. They have that "like-to-do-it" and creative (as opposed to repro- ductive) air which every stage director knows is almost impossible to instill into a large company with any hope that it will be retained after the first performance. But the Russians never lose it. A ballet, given so often as Sheherazade, during a pe- riod extending over many seasons, always seems freshly produced. There are no slovenly details. The wild orgy of the Polovtsian dances of Prince Igor is invariably exposed with a feeling on the part of the spectator that he is witnessing the in- tense enjoyment of the participants. Another important point is the variety in the ballets, a variety which covers not only subject [76] The Secret of the Russian Ballet and music, but also treatment in decoration and staging, so that such an ultra-modem work as The Sacrifice to the Spring ^ staged by Nijinsky in an attempt to emulate the style of the futurists in painting, with music by Strawinsky, who might be called a master of dissonance, and with decorations in hard and primitive colors by Roerich, finds it- self naturally side by side with the charming and poetic Sylphides, gracefully staged by Fokine, with music by Chopin (orchestrated), and with decorations in pale green and white by Bakst. Of course, some ballets, because of their fables, or the nature of their music, naturally resemble one another. Sheherazade, Cleopdtre, and Thamar all have certain points in common; so have Les Syl- phides, Carnaval, and Papillons. There is a re- semblance between Daphnis et CMoe, Narcisse, and VAprh-midi d'v/n Fmine. But it is easy to vary these likenesses by not putting them into juxtapo- sition, by mingling them with the bizarre Petrouch- ka, the barbaric Polovtsian dances from Prince Igor, the idealistic Spectre de la Rose, with Weber's Invitation to the Dance as its accompani- ment, the gorgeous and pompous Legend of Joseph, the frivolous Midas, the exotic Le Dieu [76] The Secret of the Russian Ballet Bleu, or the pageantry of the dances from Rimsky- Korsakow's Sadko, It is impossible, of course, to ignore the genius and virtuosity of individual interpretation entirely in a study of the Russian Ballet, minimize as one may its importance. There have been very many pages written in an attempt to capture the charm and genius of Nijinsky on paper. He has been described variously as "half -human, half-god," as a tongue of flame, and as a jet of water spurting from a fountain. The word "youth" expresses something of the wonder of this marvelous boy. He never seems to be doing anything difficult, and yet his command of technique is incredible. He always seems spontaneous, and yet I have been told that, hke Olive Fremstad, he does not make the slightest movement of a finger which has not been carefully thought out. He seems to me to be the greatest of stage artists (and I include all concert musicians as well as opera singers and actors in this sweeping statement). I mean by this that he communicates more of beauty and emo- tion to me as a spectator than other interpretative artists do. All impressions of this sort are neces- sarily personal, but they do not for that reason [77] The Secret of the Russian Ballet lack value. It is essential, however, to see Nijin- sky in a variety of parts to get his true measure. As the lover of the sylphs in Les Sylphides he is a pale efemine, a Chopiniac, a charming Aubrey Beardsley drawing, a lovely thing in line, and grace, and sentiment. In Petrouchka he is a pup- pet, and — remarkable touch^ — a puppet with a soul. His performance in this ballet (the characters are marionettes, but the story is something like that of Pagliacci) is, perhaps, his most wonderful achievement. He suggests only the puppet in ac- tion ; his facial expression never changes ; yet the pathos is greater, more keenly carried over the footlights, than one would imagine possible under any conditions. I have seen Fokine in the same role, and although he gives you all the gestures, the result is not the same. It is genius that Ni- jinsky puts into his interpretation of the part. Who can ever forget Nijinsky as Petrouchka when thrown by his master into his queer black box, mad with love for the dancer, who, in turn, pre- fers the Moor puppet, rushing about waving his pathetically stiff arms in the air, and finally beat- ing his way with his clenched fists through the paper window and cursing the stars.-' It is a more [78] The Secret of the Russian Ballet poignant expression of grief than most Romeos can give us. Jeux shows us the love games of a trio (two women and a man) searching for a ten- nis ball in a garden at twilight. It recalls itself to me chiefly for the glissamdo (the music is by De- bussy) with which the ballet begins as the tennis ball bounces across the stage, followed by Nijin- sky, who bounds across the broad stage of the Theatre des Champs Elysees in Paris in two leaps. These leaps are triumphs of dexterity, grace of motion, and thrill, and he does not waste them. They have given rise to the rumor that Nijinsky's element is the air. In I'AprSs-midi d'ttn Faune he makes only one of these quick movements, but with such astonishing effect that on one occasion (it was the third time I had seen this stage arrangement of Debussy's prelude to Mallarme's poem) my com- panion, a well-known dramatic critic who sits stol- idly through performances by all the great tra- gedians, burst into tears. In Sheherazade, as the black slave of the harem who dominates the story of the ballet, Nijinsky utilizes his leap to dominate the bacchanale, which is the climax of that piece of sensual excitement. As the crowd of women, wives of the sultan, and black slaves, drunk with [79] The Secret of the Russian Ballet wine and lust, enter into the wildest dance, the negro in silver trousers in the centre oi the stage leaps higher and higher straight into the air above the heads of his companions. . . . The de- scent, with the indescribable curve of the legs, is something to be seen. In Carnaval, Nijinsky en- acts the Harlequin with great roguishness and im- pertinence. To the piece called Reconaissance he dances with Karsavina, as Colombine, the most en- trancing of polkas. His dancing of the piece called Paganini, however. Is most memorable. At that point where the dominant seventh on E flat emerges through a deft use of the pedal, he repre- sents the effect to perfection by suddenly sitting down, as a writer on the "London Times" once noted. It is not, as a matter of fact, as a mere dancer that Nijinsky excels, although he does ex- cel even there, but it is in the poetic interpretation of his role, the genius in his playing, that he ex- presses so much more than his nearest rival. He is incomparable as a dancer, as you may very well see in works like Carnaval and Les Sylphides, in which dancing dominates the action; but even in these ballets he never loses sight of characteriza- tion, and the shaded values of ensemble. [80] The Secret of the Russian Ballet Tamara Karsavina is a very beautiful woman, although her beauty has not the subtle quality of the more gifted Anna Pavlowa. She is an artist and a fine dancer, a mime of great talent. She fits more perfectly into an ensemble scheme than Pavlowa, who was once a member of this organiza- tion herself. She is delicate and flower-like and she suggests vice with a great degree of verisimili- tude. Her Salome, with the painted roses on her nude knees and breasts, is a fragile bit of deca- dence. As the temptress Queen of The Golden Cock she suggests the strange perverted power of a Kundry, an Astarte, or a Loreley. In The Le- gend of Joseph it is her duty to sit at a table with- out changing her expression throughout almost an entire act. It is a difficult task ; one must perceive the depths of the woman's boredom, which does not express itself even in impatience, and she must dominate the scene. She accomplishes her tasks beautifully, as she does also the long walk across the stage in stilted Venetian shoes at the close of the scene. In Petrouchlea she is a fitting com- panion to Nijinsky, and her little dance with the comet is a delicious and entrancing moment ; her Chloe is exquisite, soft, Greek, and girlish, and in [81] The Secret of the Russian Ballet Ravel's ballet and in Florent Schmitt's Salojne she dances on her toes in bare feet (remember that half the so-called "toe-dancers" resort to padded and reinforced slippers for their power). I never lack enthusiasm for Karsavina; but I cannot place her near Nijinsky. The crescendo of eulogy with which these notes progress seems unavoidable. If one is in sympathy with the aims of this group of artists (Gordon Craig is not, I beheve), one must recognize the success with which they have carried them out. Naturally, there are flaws. 'Doboujinsky's cos- tumes for Midas are certainly very hard in color; Steinberg's music for the same ballet, a series of futile brass blares; the story itself (Bakst should confine himself to painting), a bore. Miiassine is scarcely the dancer one would have chosen for so important a role as Joseph, which, on the other hand, he is suited to physically. Karsavina's por- trayal of the ultimate emotions of Potiphar's wife is a little unconvincing. I do not even admire Bakst's setting for his very lovely costumes in I'Apres-midi d'vn Faune. R'ut these are very small insects in the amber of enjoyment. November, 1915. [82] Igor Strawinsky: A New Composer Strawinsky: A New Composer IN America we are not accustomed to look to performances of the ballet, which, after all, is not an institution with us, for musical manna. There have doubtless been ballets given here with music by composers whose names occur in Grove's Dictionary, sometimes performed by a fairly good band, but we have not expected, or re- ceived, revelations on these occasions. Since the Russian Ballet (the organization directed by Serge de Diaghilew) has travelled to and fro in Europe, Paris, and more especially London, have learned a thing or two in this respect. For much of the most interesting of the modem music has been brought to these cities by the Russians, who in- clude not only ballet but also opera in their reper- toire. They are responsible for the productions, outside of Russia, of Moussorgsky's two operas, Boris Godwnow and La Khovanchma (this latter music-drama was not produced by the Imperial Theatres in Russia until over twenty years after its publication in the Rimsky-Korsakow version. Its presentation at Moscow took place after its Paris and London performances, and at Petrograd [85] Igor Strawinsky: A New Composer only a month or so before!); Rimsky-Korsakow's operas, Ivwn the Terrible, A Night m May, and The Golden Cock; and Borodine's Primce Igor. As for ballets, Richard Strauss wrote The Legend of Joseph for these dancers; Maurice Ravel, Daph- nis et Chioe; Debussy, Jeux; Reynaldo Hahn, Le Dieu Bleu; Paul Dukas, La Peri (to be sure, this work was finally produced under other auspices; withdrawn by the composer from the Russians a few days before the date set for uie first perform- ance, on the ground that insufficient time had been allotted for rehearsals); and Tcherepnine, Nar- cisse and Le Pavilion d'Armide; but most important of all are the three ballets (and the lyric drama) contributed by I^or Strawinsky, who has, in a sense, developed a new medium out of the orches- tra by writing a new language for it, although it may be plainly seen that he is the logical descend- ant of the really Russian composers (brushing aside the Tschaikowsky-Rubinstein interlude; na- tionalism was, of course, no object with these mu- sicians). There are suggestions of Strawinsky's style so far back as Ghnka, in the Oriental dances of Russian and Luid/miUa. You will find the germs of his method in Borodine's symphonies ; from [861 Igor Strawinsky: A New Composer Moussorgsky to Strawinsky is but a step, espe- cially if you refer to the original text of Boris Go- dunow and not the Rimsky-Korsakow version. In fact, Strawinsky, in spite of his radical departures from academic methods, is the inevitable defender of the faith of the famous "Five" whose slogan was "Nationalism and Truth." As all real prog- ress in art is dependent, in a measure, on the past, it is necessary to establish this fact. My personal impressions of this young Rus- sian's music and its effect on me are very strong. I attended the first performance in Paris of Stra- winsky's anarchistic (against the canons of aca- demic art) ballet. The Sacrifice to the Spring, in which primitive emotions are both depicted and aroused by a dependence on barbarous rhythm, in which melody and harmony, as even so late a com- poser as Richard Strauss understands them, do not enter. A certain part of the audience, thrilled by what it considered a blasphemous attempt to de- stroy music as an art, and swept away with wrath, began very soon after the rise of the curtain to whistle, to make cat-calls, and to offer audible sug- gestions as to how the performance should pro- ceed. Others of us, who liked the music and felt [87] Igor Strawinsky: A New Composer that the principles of free speech were at stake, bellowed defiance. It was war over art for the rest of the evening and the orchestra played on unheard, except occasionally when a slight lull oc- curred. The figures on the stage danced in time to music they had to imagine they heard and beau- tifully out of rhythm with the uproar in the audi- torium. I was sitting in a box in which I had rented one seat. Three ladies sat in front of me and a young man occupied the place behind me. He stood up during the course of the ballet to enable himself to see more clearly. The intense excitement under which he was laboring, thanks to the potent force of the music, betrayed itself presently when he began to beat rhythmically on the top of my head with his fists. My emotion was so great that I did not feel the blows for some time. They were perfectly synchronized with the beat of the music. When I did, I turned around. His apology was sincere. We had both been car- ried beyond ourselves. Later, when the public's attitude had assumed a more formal aspect, I had a better opportunity for studying the score of this ballet. My second personal impression is a memory of [88] Igor Strawinsky: A New Composer an evening a few nights later, when I attended a performance of Strawinsky's earlier ballet, Pe- trouchka. Petrouchka is another kind of enter- tainment. It was a success with the public from the beginning, and is still an important feature in the repertoire of the Russian Ballet. It is by Pe- trouchka, in fact, that Strawinsky will be intro- duced to New York by the Russians during the current season. . . . The curtains had closed on these pathetic scenes from the Russian carnival. They were drawn back to disclose Karsavina and Nijinsky. Presently a third figure appeared, very thin and short, with a Jewish profile (I do not know, however, that Strawinsky is a Jew). Dragged on the stage by Nijinsky, pale, awkward, and timid, his near-sighted eyes blinded by the footlights, the composer bowed his acknowledg- ments to the applause, nervously fingering his eye- glasses. This account would be incomplete with- out a reference to his dress, as irreproachable in fit and texture as that of Arturo Toscanini. A London experience is also worth the telling. It happened after the first performance there of The Nightmgale, a lyric drama to set a pace in the race towards the future. There was a long [89] Igor Strawinsky; A New Composer intermission after this short opera before the con- tinuation of the bill, which included a performance of The Legend, of Joseph, the composer himself conducting, and Steinberg's Midas. In the foyer I met my friend Alfred Hertz. Those who know this conductor are familiar with his moods. Tired, after a rehearsal of Parsifal, or excited before the performance of a work which he is about to con- duct for the first time, he becomes distrait and un- conversational to a degree which would not seem possible in a man who ordinarily is as fond of anecdote as he is of Viennese pastry. I recognized his mood on this occasion. Mopping his brow (it was June), he was good enough to explain. "I can't stay here any longer," he said. "It's very embarrassing. Strauss asked me to come. I am here as his guest to hear The Legend of Jo- seph, but I can't listen to it. I'm too tired — I am exhausted. I have never heard such extraordinary music. I have never been so moved, so excited be- fore at the performance of a new opera. . . . Oh, if I could have the privilege of introducing that work to New York, then I should be happy !" I am very glad to quote these words to the last- ing honor of one who realized at once the pleasure [90] Igor Strawinsky: A New Composer that Strawinsky's music, quite in a new mode, would give to the coming generation, and to a few in the present. M. D. Calvocoressi, I believe, had the honor of signing the first article in English about Strawin- sky, shortly after the production of The Firebird in Paris. Mr. Calvocoressi is to musicians what Mr. George Moore, who introduced Paul Verlaine, Jules Laforgue, and Arthur Rimbaud to English readers, has been to poets — an appreciator of con- temporaries. This is a rare trait, one not pos- sessed by John Runciman of the "Saturday Re- view" or by several other prominent critics, whose names instantly spring to mind. The initial ar- ticle in English about the young Russian composer appeared in the London "Musical Times" for August 1, 1911. Since then Mr. Calvocoressi has written much on the subject, and a good deal of his information seems to have been gleaned from headquarters, since he quotes Strawinsky freely. (This critic is, of course, particularly interested in Russian music. He translated Balakirew's songs into French, and wrote a life of Moussorgsky. ) With the words of the composer as a guide, Mr. Calvocoressi has made a most interesting discovery, [91] Igor Strawinsky : A New Composer that in the lyric-drama music of this young man "working-out" plays no part. There is no devel- opment in the music of The Nightingale; the music simply expresses what the text dictates it shall ex- press as it goes along. (In this respect, of course, Strawinsky is but following an ukase of the "Five" to its logical conclusion; they, in their desire to create a national school, chose as the best means of banishing any suggestion of Wagner, whose theories were generally being blindly accepted and adopted by composers of music dramas at this epoch, the banning of the use of the leitmotiv. However, they repeated themes and melodies, and Moussorgsky in Boris brings back the bells that served to ring in Boris's coronation, in broken rhythm to ring out his life.) / In regard to this matter Strawinsky has put himself on record as saying, "I want to suggest neither situations nor emotions, but simply to manifest, to express them. I think there is in what are called 'impressionist' methods a certain amount of hypocrisy, or at least a tiendency towards vague- ness and ambiguity. That I shun above all things, and that, perhaps, is the reason why my methods differ as much from those of the impressionists as [92] Igor Strawinsky: A New Composer they differ from academic conventional methods. Though I often find it extremely hard to do so, I always aim at straightforward expression in its simplest form. I have no use for ''working-out' in dramatic or lyric music. The one essgntial thing is to feel and to convey one's feelings.'^ This, of course, is a more elaborate version of what Moussorgsky said, "Plain truth, however un- palatable, and nothing more. No half measures; ornamentation is superfluity." In one of Mr. Calvocoressi's recent articles about Strawinsky that critic says, in lines which illumi- nate: "According to the modern conception of the lyric drama, the chief quality of dramatic music is terseness — a quality most uncommon in all kinds of music, and which many will, not alto- gether wrongly, think almost incompatible with the very essence of musical art. The principle of music as generally understood appears to be amplification, repetition. At all events, the art of music has always con- sisted chiefly in that of 'working-out.' And It is but of late that a number of music-makers and music-expounders have raised an outcry against prolixity and redundance in music: an outcry, it [93] _ Igor Strawinsky: A New Composer must be added, that for the present does not find much echo among the majority of art judges nor of the public, "The first of great musicians to abjure the prin- ciple of formal, elaborate 'working-out' in drama- tic and lyric music was Moussorgsky. A striking peculiarity of his best songs and of his master- piece, Boris Godunow, is the absolute lack, not only of anything resembling tautology or amplification, •per se, but of all that is not absolutely essential to direct expression (including many devices which no other musician of the time would have dreamt of leaving out), even if the omission be in defiance of tonal construction and balance. "For instance, the song, The Orphan, ends very dramatically on the suspensive harmony of the dominant. Death's Lullaby, which depicts a dia- logue between a horror-stricken mother and Death, who comes to take away a child, ends abruptly on the burden of Death's last utterance, with which the composer's intention is fulfilled. He never gives a thought to the practice of bringing back the main key which would have led him either to an inappropriate modulation or to a superfluous ad- dition. Similarly, Boris Godunow, in the authen- [94] Igor Strawinsky: A New Composer tic version, ends, without even a cadence, on a chord that hardly leaves the impression of the tonic." Mr. Calvocoressi points out the fact that there are few passages for orchestra alone in Boris out- side of the polonaise and the very brief preludes to the acts, and he asks us to observe the working of the same principle in Pelleas et Melisande, in which it is evident that Debussy was influenced by Moussorgsky. Schoenberg was the first to apply this principle to orchestral music. However, if an opera-goer finds much to enjoy in the dramas of Moussorgsky and Strawinsky, it does not neces- sarily follow that all the value of a work like Die Walkiire disappears, to his ears. The two prin- ciples of art are different ; each, perhaps, is equally valid. "But the fact is that a new factor has appeared in the domain of dramatic music, which is now entering a new path ; and consequently a new order of artistic pleasure may be the outcome of this stage of evolution. The first consequence, of course, is a greater differentiation between the style of dramatic music and the style of instru- mental music; unquestionably a progress, since it [96] Igor Strawinsky: A New Composer widens the range of methods and gives greater freedom to the composer's imagination." All of this is very stimulating, and very true; stiU, it cannot be said that audiences as a whole grasp Strawinsky's intention, as it is exploited in The Nigktmgale, so readily as they do Moussorg- sky's as manifested in Boris Godv/now. Rimsky- Korsakow's emendations of the latter work, which one critic has labeled as mutilations, may be re- sponsible for the greater public reaction. But the success of Boris was by no means immediate. Pro- duced in Petrograd in 1874, it was not heard in Paris until nearly thirty years later, nor in New York until 1913. Musicians, in the meantime, had had access to the score, and had adopted some of the Moussorgsky idiom as their own. When Boris was at last produced here it was not, there- fore, the utter novelty that The Nightingale now seems. The very principle of the new music de- mands a greater effort at concentration than can be expected of most audiences when they are lis- tening to music, as many ears catch the meaning of a phrase only after it has been repeated a con- venient number of times. This is one of the chief reasons for the popular success of The Ring [96] Igor Strawinsky: A New Composer dramas. It seems incredible, and impertinent, to the average audience that a composer should have had the idea of expressing himself without repeat- ing himself. A catalogue of representative themes would be of no use to a prospective auditor of The Nightingale. Now, there are two advantages to i this method, aside from the implied advantage of an improvement in effect: First, it makes for a very short opera {The Nightmgale, in three acts, is so short that at its early performances it was given in a bill with two ballets, one of which, The Legend of Joseph, runs for over an hour) ; secondi the audience is not called upon to listen intellec- tually (nor should it be, at the performance of an opera). The only intention of the composer ist, to make his listeners feel each situation he illus- trates with his music. It may be said that Wag- to- ner's intention was the same, and thereby lies the difficulty in training listeners to understand the new principle. Wagner's way is easier for them*^ because they can get the emotional feeling through the mtellect. The repetition of themes would not in itself assure an effect, but the labeling of these themes does just that, so that whenever the Sword motif or the Siegfried motif occurs, the Tmnd of [97] Igor Strawinsky: A New Composer the listener, knowing the name of the theme, is per- fectly prepared to create the emotional reaction demanded by the composer. Strawinsky appeals t directly to the emotions. On the listener who ex- pects a theme to reappear again and again he makes only the impression of being a noise-maker (in the sense of a worker in dissonance; The Nightingale is most continent in sound). But on the open-minded auditor his effect is usually astounding. r The story of the music-drama closely follows the Hans Andersen tale. In the first act a depu- tation from the Chinese Emperor's court, headed by the kitchen-maid, seeks the nightingale in its grove. The Imperial Chancellor, the Bonze, and a number of courtiers are included in this strange procession, which follows the kitchen-maid, as she alone knows the bird's song, to request the night- ingale to come to the court to cheer up the melan- choly ruler. Although loath to leave its quiet groves, the bird agrees to go. In the second act the nightingale's arrival has stirred the Emperor's jaded senses. However, the present of a mechanical bird which comes from Japan diverts his attention. In the meantime, the [98] Igor Strawinsky: A New Composer real nightingale has disappeared. The Emperor orders the little brown songster banished from all China, while he places the mechanical toy by his bedside. Death stands in the Emperor's bedchamber in the third act. Tom by his aching conscience, the dying ruler calls in vain for his musicians to make him forget. But the nightingale returns and so charms Death with its songs that he agrees to allow the Emperor his life. The Emperor revives and offers his saviour a place at court, but the bird refuses and returns to its woodland haunts with the promise that it will sing each evening. Now the courtiers enter, prepared to find the Emperor dead. They are astounded when he sits up in bed and bids them "Good-morning !" All the symbolism, all the undercurrents of sug- gestion contained in the text are never explicitly referred to except in the brief utterances of a minor character, the fisherman, who sings a proph- ecy or an explanation at the beginning and end of each act, foretelling the delight that will be caused by the songs of the bird, the distress that will follow its departure, and its final victory over Death. [99] Igor Strawinsky: A New Composer The book offers exceptional opportunities for excursions into imitative music such as Richard Strauss, to name one composer, would take delight in expanding into pages of detail, as many of the diverting incidents of Andersen's tale are carried over into the drama. In the first act, for example, the courtiers mistake the croaking of frogs and the lowing of cattle for the song of the bird; in the second act the ladies of the court fiU their mouths with water and gargle in an attempt to imitate the nightingale's trill. These distractions do not serve to steer Strawinsky from his direct course. He notices them, of course, but in the briefest and most concise manner. The score- of The Nightmgale calls for a large orchestra, although for a continent use of it. The list of instruments includes wood-winds by threes, with a piccolo, clarinet, bass clarinet, and double- bassoon, three trombones, tuba, and two comets besides the usual two trumpets ; two harps, two glockenspiels, a celesta, a pianoforte (this part is very important), and the whole of the usual per- cussion, to which are added small antique cymbals. The parts of the nightingale and the fisherman are also sung from the orchestra pit. [100] Igor Strawinsky: A New Composer The work was begun in 1909 (this date is dis- puted) and completed in 1914!, when it received its first hearing in Paris in May, Strawinsky seems to have found difficulty in composing it. "I can write," he is reported to have said, "music to words, viz., songs ; or music to action, viz., ballets. But the cooperation of music, words, and action is a thing that daily becomes more inadmissible to my mind. And even should I finish The Nightin- gale, I do not think I shall ever attempt to write another work of that kind." Igor Strawinsky was bom June 17 (June 5» Russian style), 1882, at Oranienbaum, near Petro- grad. This date has been in dispute, and various authors have disagreed about it. My authority is Mr. Strawinsky himself. He was the son of a court- singer and was destined to study law. But, working assiduously with a pupil of Rubinstein, he became a remarkable pianist from the age of nine. He en- countered Rimsky-Korsakow at Heidelberg in 1902 (when he was 20), and that Russian composer had a great influence on his career, although very little on his musical style. During this period Strawin- sky attended concerts, visited museums, and delved in literature. Everything in the world of art is [101] Igor Strawinsky: A New Composer said to have awakened his curiosity. In 1903 he wrote the allegro of a sonata for the piano, of which the andante, scherzo and finale were com- [pleted the following year. Rimsky-Korsakow had j accepted him as a pupil, and while the young man alarmed the older composer to some extent, he se- cretly predicted great success for the only one of jhis pupils who showed revolutionary tendencies. Strawinsky says that the composer of Sheherazade struggled valiantly with himself at this period in an effort not to restrict what might be beautiful in his pupil's anarchic methods, at the same time wishing to preserve his own ideals. In 1905-6 Strawinsky worked at orchestration, and during this period, as an exercise, he orchestrated his mas- ter's opera. Pan Voyevode, from the piano score. Subsequently his work was corrected by compari- son with Rimsky-Korsakow's own scoring, recently completed. This might have been a dangerous exercise for a "sedulous ape," but Strawinsky was not that. He also orchestrated marches of Schu- bert and sonatas of Beethoven. His friends at this time were the group surrounding Rimsky-Kor- sakow, Chaliapine, Cesar Cui, Glazunow, and Blumenfeld, the chef d'orchestre. Strawinsky was married January 11, 1906. [1021 Igor Strawinsky: A New Composer Soon after his marriage he terminated his sym- phony in E flat (1905-7). It was performed in 1907, and was published later by Jurgenson. A song with orchestral accompaniment, Le Fatme et la Bergere, dates from this period (1906), and in 1908 he completed his Scherzo Fantastique, which was inspired by a reading of Maeterlinck's "Life of the Bee." This has been played in Paris. Ed- ward Burlingham Hill says of it: "In its long passages for staccato strings, divided into melodic phrases for wood-wind instruments and in fanciful figures for wind instruments, celesta, and harps, one can imagine the sinuous and yielding swaying of bees, iridescent with color, and pulsing with life." I do not think this work has been played in America. New York has not heard it. He set two poems of Gorodetzki to music in 1908. When Rimsky-Korsakow's daughter married Maxi- milien Steinberg in 1908, Strawinsky sent Fire- works as a wedding present, but before the post had delivered the gift the older composer was dead. As a tribute to his master's memory Stra- winsky composed the Chant Funebre, performed at the BelaifefF concerts. Fireworks has been played in New York both by the Russian and the New York Philharmonic Societies. Four piano etudes, [103 ] Igor Strawinsky: A New Composer written in the summer of 1908, have stood on my piano for some time. They are interesting, Vuil- lermoz says that Strawinsky began The Nightm- gale in this year; Calvocoressi's date is 1910; the programme at the first performance gave the date as 1909. About this time an incident occurred which con- siderably changed the young composer's outlook, and which brought him to the attention of a larger world. He was "discovered" by the director of i the Russian Ballet, Serge de Diaghilew, and com- missioned to write a ballet on a Russian folk-story scenario fashioned by Michel Fokine. Leon Bakst and Golovine, the painters, completed the collabo- • ration. The work. The Firebird, was terminated May 18, 1910, and produced three weeks later. The first sketches for this ballet must have been written before the death of Rimsky-Korsakow, if we are to believe a very delightful story told some- where by Calvocoressi. On hearing Strawinsky play some bars of The Firebird, the older composer is quoted as saying: "Look here, stop playing that horrid thing ; otherwise I might begin to en- joy it!" The production of The Firebird estab- lished the composer's reputation in Paris, and the [104] Igor Strawinsky: A New Composer very impressionists whose methods he has dubbed "hypocritical" were among the first to sign them- selves his admirers. Of these Maurice Ravel was the leader. Petrouchka was completed just a year later (May 26, 1911), and its production by the Russian Ballet gave his fame a firm hold with the public. His third choreographic drama, The Sac- rifice to the Spring, followed in 1913, and his opera, The Nightingdte, in 1914. Several songs, including Le petit Myosotis and Le Pigeon, are other products of recent years.* It is astonishing to learn that The Nightingale was begun so early in the composer's career, but it is still more astonishing to discover that the first sketches of The Sacrifice to the Spring were written before Petrouchka was conceived. That ballet, which achieved the great honor of being hissed in Paris (I have described the incident ear- lier in this article), is the work on which, with The Nightingale, rests his chief claim to being a com- poser with something new to say. The work differs from most of the mimed dramas given by the Rus- sians in that it is practically without a fable. The scenes take place in barbaric Russia, long before *See end of article for list of works. [105] Igor Strawinsky: A New Composer the Christian era, and we are introduced to rites connected with the worship of the soil and the springtide; after a series of ritual dances, one of the younger maidens is chosen as a sacrifice to the spring, whereupon she spares her friends the trouble of killing her by dancing herself to death. This exceedingly angular dance, the expression of religious hysteria, marvelously conceived by Nijin- sky and thrice marvelously carried out by Mile. Piltz, was one of the causes for the outbreaks at the early performances of the ballet. The lack of a fable, the early and uncertain set- ting of the action, ofi'ered Strawinsky an oppor- tunity which he seized with avidity. The music is not descriptive, it is rhythmical. All rhythms are beaten into the ears, one after another, and sometimes with complexities which seem decidedly unrhythmic on paper, but when carried out in per- formance assume a regularity of beat which a simple four-four time could not equal. H. E. Krehblel, in his valuable book, "Afro-American Folksongs," describes the tremendous effect made on him by the intricate rhythms (which he tried in vain to note down) of the musicians of African tribes at the World's Fair in Chicago. The rhyth- [1061 Igor Strawinsky: A New Composer mic effect of The Sacrifice to the Spring is as powerful and complex. It is interesting to remem- ber, in this connection, that the ancient Greeks ac- corded rhythm a higher place than either melody or harmony. Strawinsky describes the dawn of a spring morning in a few measures at the beginning of the prelude (here, it must be admitted, there is a startling reminder of rApr^s-midi d'un Faune), and then he settles down to the business, and art, of providing material for dances. This he has done with consummate effect. In many cases his chord-formations could not be described in aca- demic terms ; the instruments employed add to the strangeness of the sounds. I remember one pas- sage in which the entire corps of dancers is en- gaged in shivering, trembling from head to toe, to music which trembles also. It makes my flesh creep even to think of it again. At the beginning of the ballet the adolescents pound the earth with their feet, while a little old woman runs in and out be- tween their legs, to the reiterated beat of a chord of F flat, A flat, C flat, F flat ; G, B flat, D flat, and E flat, all in the bass (begin from below and read in order), while an occasional flute or a piccolo screams its way in high treble. Try this [107] i Igor Strawinsky: A New Composer / on your piano. "He has had recourse," writes Edward Burlingham Hill, "to a violently revolu- tionary style which is difficult to reduce to a* syste- matic analysis. Chords employing minor and major triads simultaneously in different octaves, figures in double thirds, strange aggregations of notes that can hardly be described as chords, even with critical license, are the ingredients of this un- usual style." M. Montagu-Nathan, in his "Short History of Russian Music," says: "In criticising the work, the mistake was made of suggesting that Strawinsky's music had gone back to an elemental stage in an endeavor to provide an appropriate set- ting for the pre-historic. In reality, of course, the movement was forward, in that music was used in a sphere to which it had hitherto been strange. That is progress. A composer who sets 'The Crea- tion' to living music is just as progressive as an- other who takes 'The Last Judgment' as his theme." Strawinsky seems to meet his problems according to their nature with an inevitable sense of the fit- ness of things. He has set, in Petrouchka, a story of the Russian fair ; the leading charactei-s are puppets ; the period, 1830. The music is realis- tic in tone, in some instances intentionally^ vulgar. [108] Igor Strawinsky: A New Composer It has been pointed out that the themes of the nurses' dance, the dance of the cockers, and the Russian dance in the first scene, are founded on "Hussian folk-tunes. There is all through the piece an implied tone of a village camivaT; the accor- dion~and hurdy-gurdy are never very far away, in ""suggestion at least. The dancer, personified by Mme. Karsavina, trips her lightest measures to the fanf^are^of a comet, and Petrouchka sobs out his heart to the empty sky to the screaming of a pic- colo. ^ There are tunes, real tunes, the piece abounds in them, and the whole is wrapped in an atmosphere of realism and truth which gives music the tone of originality. Incidentally, there is a triangle solo in the score. M. Montagu-Nathan says : "The carnival music is a sheer joy, and the incidents making a demand upon music as a descriptive medium have been treated not merely with marvelous skill but with unfailing instinct for the true satiric touch. Pe- trouchka is, in fact, the musical presentment of Russian fantastic humor in the second generation. There is none of the heavy scoring once thought necessary to reveal the humorous possibilities of some particular situation; Strawinsky lives in a [ 109 j Igor Strawinsky: A New Composer world which has learned to take things for granted, and his method is elliptical. This perception of proportion in humor is one of the surest indica- tions of refinement, and Petrouchka not only testifies to the composer's possession of this quality, but provides an assurance that he has a technical equipment which can hardly betray him." The fable is one of love and hate in that fanciful domain in which we become aware of the existence of a soul hitherto considered absent from such a corporeal habitation. Among the mingled crowd of merry-makers and mountebanks at the carnival is a showman, practiced in the black arts. In his booth he exposes his animated dolls: the dancer, flanked by Petrouchka, the simple fool, and the fierce Moor. The three enact a tragedy of jeal- ousy which terminates in the "shedding of Pe- trouchka's vital sawdust." j The Firebird stirred another cell in the imagina- /tion of this young Russian giant. Again he is dealing with a Russian folk-tale, but it is a fairy story this time, not a vulgar story of country life ; he has manipulated his orchestra into a thousand gorgeous colors to illustrate it. The instruments [110] (D O) CO CL (Ji CQ Tl (Q CD Igor Strawinsky: A New Composer lowed the lead of the "Five" in choosing material closely associated with Russian folk-lore. -' There came a reaction after the foundation of the Russian national school by the "Five" (Cui, / Borodine, Rimsky-Korsakow, Balakirew and Mous- sorgsky), and the result of foreign influence was felt. These composers had worked, as most of the Russian novelists have worked, with a sense of the soil from which they had sprung; their composi- tions are redolent with the mode and manner of folk-music. They chose, in most instances, Rus- sian subjects for their operas. Moussorgsky in particular effected a tremendous revolution in style, developing a manner in which ornamentation and affectation played no part ; a tense simplicity and sincerity marked all his music, which never asked alms of conventional rules of composition. (I am willing to say this quite in the face of Mr. Runci- man, who recently stated in the "Saturday Review" that there were only two Russian compositions of any importance, a symphony by Borodine and Tschaikowsky's fourth symphony. "Any other two pieces of Russian music are as alike as two mushrooms.") Rubinstein and Tschaikowsky were the leaders of the opposition, whose music is more [US] Igor Strawinsky: A New Composer akin to that of other nations. They actually suc- ceeded, for a number of years, in establishing them- selves in England, France, and America as the rep- resentative Russian composers. And naturally their immediate success was greater, even in their own country, where individuals were trying to free themselves from the curse of their birthright, struggling up from the soil ; culture was growing. John Reed tells a wonderful story of a Serbian peasant who, having assimilated some culture (in Serbia Kultur is about twenty years old), was re- minded by the fields of Beethoven's Pastoral Sym- phony. So the Russians, learning French, were a thousand times more impressed with salon music than they were with the work of their more na- tional composers. Moussorgsky, of course, has only recently been dragged out of his retirement, even now in somewhat modified form. (Neither of his operas is produced as he wrote it ; he died leav- ing the orchestration of La Khovanchma unfin- ished; Rimsky-Korsakow reorchestrated Boris — a needless task, perhaps a desecration ; he also wrote a good deal of the orchestration of La Khovan- chma; the work was completed by Maurice Ravel and Strawinsky in a more reverent spirit.) Stra- [mj Igor Strawinsky: A New Composer winsky is the new giant upon whom has fallen the mantle of Russian nationalism. His work is based, primarily, on the work of the "Five," all of whom are dead. That he reminds one occasionally of the modern Frenchmen only means that they, too, have learned their lessons from Borodine and Moussorg- sky; Debussy's debt to Moussorgsky has fre- quently been acknowledged; it is obvious if one compares Pelleas et MMisande with Boris Godunow. Strawinsky's love of Oriental color is possibly an inheritance from his master, Rimsky-Korsakow. This young Russian has appeared in an epoch I in which the ambition of most composers seems to be to dream, to write their symbolic visions in terms of the mist, to harmonize the imperceptible. Stra- winsky sweeps away this vague atmosphere with one gesture; his idea of movement is Dionysian; he overwhelms us with his speed. One critic has referred to him as the "whirling dervish of his- art." His gifts to future composers are his con- ciseness, his development of the complexities of rhythm, and his invention of chord-formation. His use of dissonance is an art in itself. Richard Strauss has employed dissonance in obvious de- velopment of Richard Wagner's polyphonic and [115] L- Igor Strawinsky: A New Composer chromatic style. Pushed to its furthest, his sys- tem is one of inversion. With Strawinsky the use of dissonance is invention itself. He improvises new chords, while Strauss is taking recognized chords apart to make something else of them. So this new figure stands for something in advance of what has already been expressed. He is, per- haps, the most vital of the modem forces in the music world. August 6, 1915. Here is the complete bibliography of Strawinsky's works (the list has been revised and edited by the com- poser himself) : Symphony in E flat, op. 1, 1905-1907 ( Jurgenson) ; Le Faune et la Berg^re, voice and orchestra, op. 2, 1907 (Belaieff) ; Sdherso Fantastique for orchestra, op. 3, 1907-8 ( Jurgenaon) ; Fireworks, for orchestra, op 4, 1908 (Schott) ; Funeral Hymn for the death of Bimsky- Korsakow, op. 5, 1908 (MS.) ; Four l^tudes for the piano, op. 6, 1908 (Jurgenson) ; Two Melodies (words by Gorodetzski), voice and piano, op. 7, 1908 (Jurgenson) ; The Firebird, "Conte dansS," 1909-10 (Jurgenson) ; Two Melodies (words by Verlaine), voice and piano, 1910 (Jurgenson) ; Petrouchka, burlesque scenes in four tableaux, 1910-11 (Russischer Musik-Verlag) ; Two Melodies (words by Bal- mont), for voice and piano, 1911 (Russischer Musik-Ver- lag) ; Les Rot des Etoiles (words by Balmont), for chorus and orchestra, 1911 (Russischer Musik-Verlag) ; The Sac- rifice to the Spring, tableaux of Pagan Russia, in two parts, 1911-13 (Russischer Musik-Verlag); Three Melodies (Japanese poems), for voice and small orchestra, 1912, [ 116 1 Igor Strawinsky; A New Composer (Ruasischer Musik-Verlag) ; Souvenir de ma Jeunesse, three children's songs for voice and piano, 1913 (Russischer Musik-Verlag); The Nightingale, opera in three acts, 1909-14 (Russischer Musik-Verlag). Recent works include three pieces for string quartet (MSS.), played by the Flonzaley Quartet in New York, November 30, 1915; and a new ballet in two parts, for the Russian Ballet, entitled Les Noces villageoises. Strawinsky has also orchestrated a melody of Beethoven, some of the works of Grieg and Chopin, and the song of the Boyard Chaklovity from La Khovanchina of Moussorg- sky. With the aid of notes left by the composer he wrote the final chorus of La Khovanchina. [117] Massenet and Women Massenet and Wo men THE name of Jules Massenet, spoken before his tomb, should evoke many memories be- sides the souvenirs of the delicate melodies he wrote — ^memories of beautiful and frail women, a long, exotic list, women whom he melodically created in his operas and women whom he selected to sing his heroines. Xavier Leroux in his preface to the "Souvenirs," in which Massenet carefully describes his life, calls him the musicien de la femme. His music is pe- culiarly feminine — "melodically, sentimentally, sen- suously feminine," says Philip Hale. "The Eve of Massenet is a Parisian cocotte. His Mary Mag- dalen is a grande amoureuse even after her conver- sion ; a true sister of Thais." Marie-Magdeleine, Eve, Salome, Manon, the fragrant, who suggested a flower girl in the Boule- vard des Capucmes; Chimene, inspired by the clas- sic Comeille; Esclarmonde, in which the astonish- ing Sybil Sanderson rose to her fame; Charlotte, who, according to Thackeray, having seen Wer- ther's body "borne before her on a shutter, like a well-conducted person went on cutting bread and [m] Massenet and Women butter"; the eternal Thaifs, who at first failed to interest the jaded boulevards; the sanguinary Anita, the girl from Navarre; Sapho, who never, in the opera at least, was carried upstairs Until Mary Garden portrayed her ; Cinderella, the faith- ful Griselidis, many times tempted; the Spanish dancer, I'Ensoleillad and Nina in the opera Cheru- bm; Ariane and her companions, Phedre and Per- sephone; Therese, Dulcinee, and the Queen Ama- helly, all written for that "grande tragedienne lyrique," Lucy Arbell: it would seem that every country and every period of history had been searched for a complete survey of feminism. And among the unproduced works which the composer left in a completed form is a Cleo- pdtre! ■ And what a list of women has sung these parts ! Women whom Massenet wholly or partly adored; women for whom he dropped precious dots of ink on paper, instead of buying them pearls in the Rue de la Paix; women for whom, in some in- stances, he preserved his scores for years. For Massenet was never hasty. He never gave a score to an unworthy interpreter. In this connection it is only necessary to remember that Amadis, com- [ 122 ] Massenet and Women pleted in 1890, and Pcmurge, completed in 1910, are not yet produced (1912). Women reciprocated his love. Louis Schneider, in his biography of the composer, puts it thus : "A woman is like a child ; she gives instinctively to the person who loves her. This explains why his in- cessant glorification of woman made aU women like him." And so, linked indissolubly with the name of Massenet, we may recall the names of those who helped him to build his fame as the feminist com- poser, those who "created" in the theatre the atmo- sphere he had devised for his characters. Five names stand out in prominent relief : the charming Marie Heilbronn, the ill-fated Sybil Sanderson, Emma Calve, Mary Garden, and Lucy Arbell. But there are countless others: Marie Renard, who "created" Charlotte and first sang Manon in Vienna; Marie Delna, who brought Werther to Paris; Lina Cavalieri, the first Ensoleillad in Cherubim,, who afterwards introduced Thais and Manon to Italy, and later brought back Thais to the repertoire of the Paris Opera ; Lucienne Breval, who was the first Ariane and Griselidis ; Marguerite Carre, the first Nina in Cherubm and who assisted [123] Massenet and Women in the revival of Sapho at the Opera-Comique ; Mile. Kousnezoff, the Fausta in Roma; Mme. Du- vivier, Salome at Brussels; Mme. Fides-Devries, Salome at Paris ; Pauline Viardot, the sister of the great Mahbran, who sang Marie-Magdeleine as an oratorio at the Odeon, April 11, 1873; Lina Pacary, who sang one season at New Orleans, who was the first to sing the Magdeleine in operatic form; Julia Guiraudon, the first Cendrillon; Aino Ackte, the first Vierge ; Josephine de Reszke, sister of two famous singers, who "created" the leading feminine role in Le Roi de Lahore; and Mme. Galli- Marie, the first Carmen, who honored the first per- formance of Don Cesar de Bazan. But the list is interminable. What names does it not include? What beautiful woman with a voice of the past three decades does not receive a few words of grati- tude in the "Souvenirs"? Of all the women, however, who have sung the Massenet roles the one most particularly identified with the composer was Sybil Sanderson, the beau- tiful CaHfomia girl, whose career was as short as it was brilliant. Massenet met her at a dinner given by an American friend. She came with her mother, described by the composer as being almost [124] Massenet and Women as beautiful as her daughter. After dinner Miss Sanderson asked the composer if he would hear her sing. He consented affably, as was his cus- tom — ^never was there a more gentle man! — and seated himself at the piano. "You will excuse me," she added, "if I do not sing your music. That would be too auda- cious." She ended by doing something very much more audacious: she sang the second air of the Queen of the Night from The Magic Flute. The composer's feelings may be adjudged from his remarks in his Souvenirs: "What a prodigious voice ! Three octaves, either forte or pianissimo!" He did not waste any time. His publisher was urging him to set a poem on a Byzantine subject, Esclarmonde, to music, and, with Sybil Sanderson in mind, he went to work directly on the score. Esclarmonde, in which Massenet pays his tribute to Wagner — the subject suggests Parsifal and Tristan um,d Isolde, to say nothing of Armide — was produced at the Opera-Comique during the Paris Exposition of 1889. It was given 101 times before Miss Sanderson went to Brussels. Before her debut Sybil ' Sanderson was scarcely [125 ] Massenet and Women known in Paris. It was rumored among artists that Massenet had written an opera for a fair Californian (she was the daughter of Judge S. W. Sanderson, of the Supreme Court) who was being trained by the master to play the title part, and some few had seen Massenet dining at a restaurant in the Rue Daunou with an American girl, accom- panied by a lady who, judging from the likeness of the two, was probably her mother. Then came her debut, and all Paris was talking about La Belle Sanderson, and the extraordinary range of her voice. Thais, the famous opera of the monk and the Alexandrian courtesan, was also written for Miss Sanderson. While Massenet was composing it the singer was appearing three times a week at the Opera-Comique in Manon. It was therefore for that theatre that Thais was destined. However, Miss Sanderson, like many another artist before and since, moved by a sudden caprice, signed a contract with Gailhard to sing at the Ojjera, with- out taking the trouble to inform Carvalho, then manager of the Opera-Comique. Massenet did not hesitate. He wrote to Gailhard: "You have the artist ; the work must follow her !" [126] Massenet and Women Thais was produced March 16, 1894! — and failed! At that time the book was considered a trifle indelicate! Even Sybil Sanderson's popu- larity could not save it. In 1898 the work was re- vived with Mme. Berthet in the title part. For this reprise Massenet wrote a new scene in the oasis and the scene of the ballet, which have always been omitted in American representations, except in Boston. Lina Cavalieri sang the work in Paris in 1907. Since then it has never been long from the afjiches of the Opera, while in America it has be- come one of the most popular of modem operas, thanks to Mary Garden, who made her American debut in the title role, and subsequently prevented Lina Cavalieri from singing it in New York. While he was writing Thais Massenet always kept a tiny figurine on his writing table. This had been made for him by Gerome, and served him as his present inspiration. Here is the tribute that Massenet pays to Sybil Sanderson in his "Souvenirs" : "Sybil Sanderson ! . . It is only with poignant emotion that I recall this singer struck by pitiless Death, in her full beauty, in the glory of her talent. Ideal Manon at the Opera-Comique ; unf orgetable Thais [127] Massenet and Women at the Opera ; these roles identified themselves with her temperament, one of the most magnificently gifted that I have ever known. An invincible voca- tion called her to the theatre, there to become the ardent interpreter of many of my works ; but also, for us, what joy to write operas and roles for the artists who realize our dreams! . . . "The silent crowd which pressed on the way of the cortege which led Sybil Sanderson to her last home was considerable. Over it a veil of sadness seemed to hang. Albert Carre and I followed the coffin. We walked directly behind what remained of her beauty, grace, and talent, and Carr^, in- terpreting the feelings of the people about us, said: " 'She was loved.' " It is to the "Souvenirs" also that we must turn for a description of the selection of the first Manon. Mme. Carvalho sighed when she heard the music, and breathed the wish that she was twenty years younger, so that she might sing it. Characteris- tically, Massenet dedicated the score to her. He wanted Mme. Vaillant-Couturier, then singing an operetta of Lecocq's at the Nouveautes, for the opera. [128] Massenet and Women "She interested me greatly and, as I thought, bore an astonishing resemblance to a young florist of the Boulevard des Capucines. Without ever having spoken [it must be remembered that this book was written for Massenet's grandchildren] to this delicious young girl, I was obsessed by the vision, and the thought of her was ever with me. This was indeed the Manon whom I had' seen, whom I saw always before me as I worked." The manager of the Nouveautes would not let Mme. Vaillant-Couturier go, but while they were talking Massenet observed that Brasseur had his eyes on a pretty gray hat with roses, which was going up and down the foyer. The hat moved toward the composer. "A debutant then no longer recognizes a debu- tante?" It should be explained that Marie Heilbronn had appeared in Massenet's first opera. La Grand,' Tamte. "Heilbronn!" I exclaimed. "Herself." She reminded him of his first opera and the part she took in it, and in answer to his questions con- tinued: "No, I am rich, and yet, shall I confess [129] Massenet and Women it? I wish to go back on the stage ; I am haunted by the theatre. If I could only find a good role." Massenet told her of Manon, and that night, at her insistence, he played the music through for her at her apartment in the Champs-Elysees. It was 4.30 in the morning when he was done. She had been moved to tears, and from time to time she would exclaim, "That is my life; it's my life!" In speaking of Heilbronn's death after the eightieth odd performance of Manon the composer says: "Ah, who will tell artists how faithful we are to their memories; how attached to them we are; the great grief which the day of separation brings us.? I should prefer to stop performances rather than have the part sung by another." This in itself is beautiful, but read what he has to say of her successors : "Some time afterward the Opera-Comique dis- appeared in flames and Manon was not performed for ten years. It was the dear and unique Sybil Sanderson that revived the work at the Opera-Co- mique. She played at the two hundredth. A glory was reserved for me at the five hundredth when the part was taken by Mme. Marguerite Carre. Some [130] Massenet and Women months ago this captivating and exquisite artist was applauded the night of the seven hundred and fortieth performance. Let me be permitted to salute in passing the fine artists who have also taken the part: Miles. Mary Garden, Geraldine Farar (so reads the book), Lina Cavalieri, Mme. Brejean-Silver, Miles. Courtney, Genevieve Vix, Mmes. Edwina and Nicot-Vauchelet — and how many other dear artists besides ! They will pardon me if their names do not come at this moment to my grateful pen." Massenet wrote two operas for Emma Calve, and she appeared in four other of his works. La Navarraise, London, June 20, 1894, and Sapho, Opera-Comique, November 27, 1897, were written for her. She also sang Salome in Herodiade, Chi- raene in Le Cid, and the leading feminine roles in Le Roi de Lahore and Le Mage. Adolphe JuUien, the French critic, says some- where : "Hors de Calve pas de Sapho possible, aux yeux du compositeur." Yet when Marguerite Carre sang this work, founded on Daudet's famous novel, at its reprise at the Opera-Comique in 1909, he wrote an entire new scene for her. Mary Gar- den was the American Sapho, and was adversely [131] Massenet and Women criticised for her forceful acting in the early parts of the play. Yet Jullien writes of Calve : "Mile. Emma Calve, c'est le cri general, joue et chante avec une ardeur presque excessive le per- sonnage de Sapho, tres-difficile k faire accepter a I'Opera-Comique, en passant de la langueur la plus lascive a la violence la plus grossiere, par ex- ample quand elle injurie ses anciens amants qui viennent de devoiler son passe au malheureux Gaus- sin." Another Sapho was Georgette Leblanc, who also created some excitement with an exceedingly im- modest conception of Thais. Anita in La Navarraise shares, along with Car- men and Santuzza, the honor of being one of the three roles of her varied repertoire which Calve was permitted to sing frequently in this country. It was not long ago that she appeared as Anita at the Manhattan Opera House, where she was suc- ceeded in it by Mme. Gerville-Reache. The work is still in the repertoire of the Opera-Comique (or was, before the war began). Although Mary Garden has done more to estab- lish Massenet's reputation in this country than any other singer, and has sung many of his operas suc- [132 ] Massenet and Women cessfully in Europe, especially Manon and Thais, Massenet wrote only one part especially for her, the title role of Cherubim. Cherubm was produced at Monte Carlo, February 14, 1905. He is the same youngster immortalized by Beaumarchais and Mozart. He is but seventeen in the Frenchman's opera, but his good looks and audacity make him a veritable Don Juan. Schneider wrote of Mary Garden in the title part : "She is Cherubin himself, in flesh and bones ; she was the joy and delight of the evening. By reason of her slenderness and agility, her easy and graceful manner, with her innocent airs of con- quest and her naive mien of vexation, she is truly the irresistible youth in whose presence all hearts surrender. And to think that M. de Croisset, only the day before, insisted that his Cherubin should not be played by a woman ! His, perhaps, but not that of M. Massenet." It was Oscar Hammerstein's idea that Mary Garden should perform another man's part. Tired, it is said, of the continuous assertions to the effect that all his operas were written about women for women, Massenet wrote Le Jongleur de Notre Dame, in which the single female figure, that of [1331 Massenet and Women the Virgin, does not sing a note. It is interesting to observe that this opera is dedicated to Mme. Massenet. It was produced February 18, 1902, at Monte Carlo. Paris heard it two years later. When Mr. Hammerstein decided to produce it in New York he asked Miss Garden if she would sing the part of the Juggler, hitherto in every instance sung by a man. She assented, and appeared in the role at the Manhattan, November 27, 1908. Her success in the role was immediate and continued. Massenet, in the "Souvenirs," speaks of the affair: "I was a little frightened, I admit, at the idea of the monk taking off his robes after the play to put on a smart gown from the Rue de la Paix. But before the triumph of the artist I bow and applaud." Thais introduced Mary Garden to America, and it is in this role that she has achieved the greatest popular success of her career. She has sung it everywhere, from Paris to Brooklyn. She sang Sapho three times in New York and Griselidis a few times. "I sang the patient Griselda first at Aix-les- Bains," she once told a reporter. "The King of Greece heard me, and said he didn't think the part [134] Massenet and Women a suitable one for me. I wonder what he meant !" Miss Garden has also sung Manon, and Prince Charmant in CendriLlon, Massenet's last inspiration was a contralto, Lucy Arbell, who fired his brain to many creations. She sang the role of Persephone in Ariane. This god- dess of the nether world appeared only in one act of this long opera, but into that act Massenet put the most popular air of the score, the air of the roses, "Emmene ta sceur." After Ariane had been performed sixty times at the Paris Opera, Massenet asked her how many times she had sung the part, thinking she would have forgotten. "Sixty," she answered. "Wrong," he replied, "for you have repeated the air of the roses every night. You have sung the part 120 times !" The part of Dulcinee in Don Quichotte was writ- ten for Lucy Arbell. She sang it both in Paris and Monte Carlo. It is sfiid that before the first performance she spent considerable time learning to play the guitar, so that she could accompany her air in the fourth act herself. Therese, Bacchus and Roma all contain parts written with Lucy Ar- [135] Massenet and Women bell in mind. One cannot do better than close with the picture evoked by Massenet in describing the effect which the music of Therese had on his inter- preter when he first played it to her. "At the first playing of the score to our crea- trice, Lucy Arbell, artist that she was, stopped me as I was playing the final scene, where Therese, with a cry of fear, sees the terrible cart bearing her husband, Andre Thorel, to the scaffold, and screams, 'Vive le roil' with all her force, so that she may be sure of joining her husband in his death. It was at this instant that our interpreter, greatly moved, stopped me and said, 'I could never smg that scene up to the end, because when I recognized my husband, who gave me his name, who saved Ar- mand de Clerval, I should lose my voice. I ask you to let me declaim the end of the piece.' Great ar- tists alone," concludes Massenet, "have the gift of divining these instinctive movements." October, 1912. [136] Stage Decoration as a Fine Art Stage Decoration as a Fine Art THE question of the use of "scenery" on the stage is perpetually bobbing up, and as perpetually it remains an unsolved ques- tion. Specific instances of the dire harm that the decoration can do to a play may be observed in our theatres almost any week during the active season. To take an example, let us mention one of Mr. Sothern's Shakespearean productions, which had already been cut to run within the time- limit, but which played from eight in the evening until midnight because the "elaborate" settings had to be changed frequently. The intermissions, as a result, occupied more of the spectators' patience than the play. In another instance, a musical comedy went to pot on the first night because the stagehands could not handle the setting of the sec- ond act with enough expedition. As a result, they kept the curtain down for thirty minutes, a fatal length of time in a playhouse devoted to frivolity. John Palmer, in that book, quotation from which is sheer delight, "The Future of the Theatre," says that this is the age of the "naturalist" drama, and that as a result, when anyone tries to produce a [139] Stage Decoration as a Fine Art "romantic" or "poetic" play, there is an attempt made to wrap up the shortcomings of the perform- ance in elaborate upholstery. "Why does the electrician or the costumier be- come so much' more important in poetic than in naturalist drama? The electrician and costumier become more important as the author and actor become less competent of themselves to assert their intention. Naturalist authors and naturalist players are masters of their method. The poetic dramatists and players are not. Poetic drama has fallen upon evil times. The dramatist, being un- equal to his burden, the artificers in light and hair and turpentine are invoked to help him sustain it. In the mid-twentieth-century outburst of poetic splendor, which will follow the foundation of our national theatre, it will soon be realized how the former degradation of the poetic drama was di- rectly measured by the importance yielded thereby to the subordinate crafts. The quaint superstition of to-day that the limelight man is an important person in the raising of Caesar's ghost will disap- pear when poetic drama of the future is lifted to the level of the naturalist drama of to-day. "Even to-day, when there comes an actor of [140] Stage Decoration as a Fine Art genius who can present Shakespeare in the solid flesh, it is possible for the least reflective play-goer to reaUze how little it matters that the limelight is not of the latest and best quality, or that paint upon the scene is spread too thick. We have lately had opportunities, within a single year, of measur- ing Shakespeare as produced by Mr. Granville Barker against Shakespeare as acted by Sir Johns- ton Forbes-Robertson. Compare for a moment Mr. Barker's Twelfth Night with Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson's Hamlet. Mr. Barker's Twelfth Night had every advantage that a producer can bestow. Beautiful costumes against a decorative background, excellent music, an intelligent revival of the necessary apron, a very fair quality of acting, rising in a few instances to an extremely high level of accomplishment — all that the pro- ducer as fine-artist has been able to discover was tested and adapted for the occasion. " 'Look here upon this picture, and on this.' "Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson in his Hamlet of 1913 seemed bent upon showing once for all that production matters not at all when great act- ing is toward. The Drury Lane Hamlet of 1913 showed not only that the actor and his author re- [1*1] Stage Decoration as a Fine Art quire no artistic aid of theatrical haberdashers to make their effect, but also that the actor and his author, if they have as much genius between them as will cover a penny piece, can unite and play clean out of existence the ugliest daubs of the false cardboard naturalism of the late 'nineties.' In Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson's Hamlet was no bor- rowed grace of the producing fine-artist. Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson had not even the ad- vantage of the poetic conventions to which his play was originally fitted. He made, his dramatic ap- peal in spite of his conditions, rather than with their assistance. Yet everyone open to the appeal of Shakespeare had to declare that. the total ass- thetic effect of Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson's Hamlet infinitely outweighed the total sesthetic ef- fect of Mr. Barker's Hamlet." Now, this is the most specious kind of argument. Of course, genius, even unclothed genius, is at all times preferable to mediocrity decked in gauds, but genius properly caparisoned is only added to. If Forbes-Robertson's interesting study of Hamlet had been properly set, its effect would have been even more vivid. Let us take, for instance, the case of the Rus- [142] Stage Decoration as a Fine Art sian dancers. Anna Pavlowa is generally regarded as the greatest of living women dancers. A similar place is assigned Waslav Nijinsky among the male dancers. And yet it cannot be said that Mile. Pav- lowa, with her mediocre (in most instances) scenic and choreographic accompaniments, makes the ef- fect that Nijinsky does surrounded by the Bakst scenery and the elemental spontaneity of the su- perb Russian ballet. Mile. Pavlowa's genius creates the utmost enthusiasm ; it awakens admira- tion on every hand ; but it would be more compel- ling were it encased in the beauty which it suggests. To take another example, let us regard the pro- duction of Boris Godv/now at the Metropolitan Opera House. Seldom, at this theatre, have more dramatic splendors been revealed than Adamo Di- dur showed us in the title part ; and never has such adequate staging been seen there. The scenery and costumes, in fact, were all a part of the Rus- sian equipment used in Paris a few seasons ago. Mme. Fremstad's Briinnhilde in Gdtterddmmerung is an even more indisputable proof of genius than Mr. Didur's Boris (taking into account the Rus- sian's close following of his model, Feodor Chalia- pine), but the setting of Gdtterdammerwng at the [143] Stage Decorati on as a Fine Art Opera is so unimagiiiative, so unappealing, so un- suggestive, that one has to forget that before one can focus one's attention on the compelling art of the singing actress. Of late years the item of scenery has become more and more costly, more and more elaborate. What does it mean, after all, the kind of scenery we see? Who cares about the painted stumps of trees, the ridiculous apple blossoms and the pink drawing-rooms.'' A little simple staging would ef- fect a much needed reform in the American Thea- tre, especially if it were coupled with a good play. It is in Europe that attempts have been made at reform. Some of them have been successful. Gordon Craig has been accounted the inventor of many of the ideas that are prevalent at present, but like many other inventors, he neither had the practical ability, nor perhaps the desire, to put them into effect himself. Stanislawsky, Reinhardt, and even Bakst, have all learned something from him, and have turned his ideas to practical ac- count. At present Gordon Craig, ensconced in the Arena Goldoni in Florence, is said to be at the head of a great school which shall teach the art [144] Stage Decoration as a Fine Art of the theatre. He is, to be sure, surrounded by a pack of boys with soulful eyes, who wear dirty- greens and call him "Master." These he takes driving occasionally over the hiUs near Florence in no other vehicle than a coach and four. When this monumental anachronism passes through the Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele, or down the Via Tor- nabuoni with its crowd from Patience seated aloft, the effect on the populace of Firenze La Bella can be only faintly imagined. Occasionally someone tries to effect an entrance into the school over which this eccentric genius pre- - sides and for which he issues pronunciamentos and catalogues without number, to say nothing of ad- vertisements, and articles in "The Mask," and af- fiches which are pasted on the high walls of the Italian and English towns. If the youth who is hardy enough to make the trial succeeds in reach- ing the great presence he may be deemed a lucky mortal. Mr. Craig observes each newcomer from carefully prepared peep-holes. One look convinces him whether the prospective student has talent for the arts or not ; one look alone suffices. Once hav- ing made up his mind, nothing changes it. Robert Jones tried to invade the domain of the [145 ] Stage Decor ation as a Fine Art Craig school last summer, but not once could he get near the Master; not once could he get any more information than that very vague sort which is included in the catalogue. Jones, sick of trying to get on in Florence, went to Germany and now is one of Reinhardt's props and aids. (He has since done good work in New York.) Another friend of mine who did not care to en- ter the school had more success. He attained the Craig presence. "But how," he asked, "do you intend to teach music without teachers?" "Oh," answered Mr. Craig quite simply* "we shall work away, driving nails into boards, or walk- ing in the country, and when we feel like it we shall sing!" And so the possessor of some of the best ideas that have come to the theatre in recent years in- geniously steps aside while others, with a view to their more practical use, apply them to their own purposes. (I need not refer to Adolphe Appia here. I leave his case for a separate discussion.) In the first paragraph of this article I empha- sized the practical value of simpler scenery for plays which require frequent or sudden changes; [146] Stage Decoration as a Fine Art but, of course, the artistic side far outweighs thai. The kind of scenery we see so much of in New York really deceives nobody. The moment a hu- man heing of three dimensions steps on the stage you have that human being posing against badly painted pictures. It is as if one should combine statuary and painting. .The Intention in current stage decoration seems to be to intensify the lack of imagination on the part of the spectator. Each part of what is called the scenery of a play is so clearly defined that there is no opportunity for the communication of suggested feeling. The spectator sees at once that he is looking at an imitation of the place, scenery painted to look as much like the place as possible. As a consequence he has the feeling, after the first five minutes, if he has imagination, that he Is not In the place at all. When the photo- graphic accuracy wears away the lack of sugges- tion becomes appalUng. The commonplace is scaled. This is said, taking into account scenery which has scarcely any plastic features — such scenery, for instance, as is used to a great extent at the Metropolitan Opera House, where rocks and rills, [147] Stage Decoration as a Fine Art woods, templed hills and marble halls are painted' on flimsy drops. In palaces the architectural fea- tures are depicted in the same naive way, using the word naive in its worst sense. I believe that scenery like this is intended to represent the real thing just as much as a papier-mache mill which crushes the villain in a melodrama, and it succeeds just as much. This art, I think, came from Italy. At least, most of the scenery that is painted in this fashion, or the inspiration for it, comes from there nowa- days. May it not be possible that it is suggested to the scene-painter by the houses one sees in the small Italian towns, where windows with shutters often are painted on the fa9ade.'' The fantasy of some of these windows is sublime. Occasionally, persons are painted looking out of them. Dogs sit on the sills ; I have seen peacocks. In some in- stances the whole architecture is painted on the outside of the house — columns, balconies, and all. This is a familiar enough device in Italian churches, and I fancy many Catholic churches in America may show traces of the style. Carl Hagemann of Germany tries to get away from this sort of thing, just as David Belasco has [148] Stage Decoration as a Fine Art tried to in New York, by making his whole scene plastic, every object built separately inside of a sky drop which runs around from one proscenium arch to the other. If he uses a house or a tree or a bench, it is not painted on the drop. It is built. In the case of interiors his task is easier, of course. This method of procedure has two distinct dis- advantages. In the first place, it takes away all the charm of suggestion, which I think should play an important part in theatrical entertain- ment, and in the second place, it does away with the possibility of producing a play with more than one scene in each act, unless the producer happens to have a revolving stage in his theatre, an equip- ment, by the way, which every playhouse in New York should possess. Hagemann gave Goethe's Faust, which has countless scenes, by means of a revolving stage. He has produced Shakespearean plays in this manner. Mr. Belasco has followed Hagemann's method pretty closely in some of his recent productions. The Auctioneer is a play, it seems to me, which needs this kind of scenery, if anything does. A Good Little DevU, on the other hand, would have benefited greatly by more imagi- native treatment. [149] Stage Decoration as a Fine Art Gordon Craig, of course, would substitute sug- gestion for realism. He uses a combination of screens, cccasional draperies, and little else, to gain his ends. The lighting is all from above ; the natu- ral lighting in this world. If your floors were made of glass under which were concealed hun- dreds of glaring electric lights, you would get the effect that footlights give on the stage. It seems to me there are few romantic or poetic plays which would not be improved by Craig's method of staging ; and yet he has had little prac- tical experience in putting on pieces. Sets of model scenes for Handet and Macbeth have been exhibited in London. I think Beerbohm Tree used adaptations of one of these at one time. Certainly Craig's Handet was seen at Stanislawsky's Theatre in Moscow. It is highly probable that Isadora Duncan's dancing background is a fancy of Gor- don Craig's. However, little of the practical work of this man has reached the public, except through his books, which are verbose and vague except in spots; and through his conversation, which is usually said to be unillumined even by flashes. Craig worked at Moscow for a considerable time, [160] Stage Decoration as a Fine Art however, and it is probable that from the point of view of staging, Stanislawsky now leads the world. He has adopted some of Craig's ideas and fitted them to others until he has obtained a formula for staging every play from Le Bourgeois Gentil- homme to Hedda Gdbler. This theatre is the di- rect antithesis of the Opera-Comique in Paris, which has obtained such a false reputation for good staging. The Opera-Comique clings stolidly to the Italian method of using flimsy drops, with every detail carefully painted thereon, combined with plastic objects, the whole painted in pastel or primary colors in a manner to suggest a St. Valentine's gift of the 1850 period. The lighting is usually excellent. There are no innovations to be looked for at the Opera-Comique at present, which holds as fast to its traditions as if the Russian Ballet had never been seen in Paris. Max Reinhardt and Leon Bakst have utilized Craig's ideas in a measure, but they have altered them to a degree where they have become unrecog- nizable. Reinhardt is known in New York by Svmnirun, one of his slightest productions. Still, it gives a good idea of his impressionistic use of [151] Stage Decoration as a Fine Art flat surfaces to create atmosphere and a colorful background to his picture. Leon Bakst, who has designed many of the fa- mous ballets which the Russians give in Paris and other Continental cities from time to time, pro- ceeds on a more lavish scale. There are no plastic features in a scene by Bakst. Everything is painted on flat canvas, but the barbaric gorgeous- ness, the impressionistic and suggestive qualities, appeal to the eye as no attempted copy of a real scene could ever do. The number of colors he uses in one scene is almost countless, and yet the combination is always thrilling and effective. Bakst is better known for his Sheherazade than for any other of his ballets, but he also designed the scenery for Camaval, Thamar, Jeux, Daphnis et Chloe, Narcisse, VAprSs-midi d'tm Faime, and Le Spectre de la Rose. He has further utilized his supreme talent for decoration in staging the dramas in which that Russian mime, Ida Rubinstein, has appeared at the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris during recent seasons: Oscar Wilde's S.alome, Verhaeren's HS- lene de Sparte, and d'Annunzio's Le Martyre de [162] Stage Decoration as a Fine Art Stiint-Sebastien and La PisaneUe, on la Mort par- fwmee. It was in this last play, produced in Paris in the spring of 1913 for ten special performances, that Bakst expressed himself perhaps more person- ally than he had hitherto been able to do. Unlim- ited means were placed at his disposal. He had all the money he wanted and an exactitude in color, in scene and costume, was aimed at which required the dyeing and redyeing of many stuffs, and the searching through countless shops for others. The scene in the port, with the ship of the blood- red sails painted against a sky of blood-red clouds, in front of which figures garbed in scarlet, vermil- lion, maroon, rose, mulberry, carnation, and other shades of this brilliant color carried on the drama, will not soon be forgotten by those who saw it. In the final scene Bakst combined black, white, green, orange, rose, and magenta in the most extraordi- nary manner. In this play, too, he utilized a series of curtains of different colors, according to the scene, which hung half the depth of the stage on either side. And back of the proscenium arch, also on either side, was builded a column of gold, each column divided into numberless small pillars, like [1631 Stage Decorat ion as a Fine Art the mass which supports the ribs of a vaulted roof of a great Gothic cathedral. This season Bakst has staged two new ballets for the Russians, Richard Strauss's The Legend of Joseph, in which Paolo Veronese is suggested in the superb Venetian robes, and PapiUons, which calls into play the same qualities Bakst had already exhibited in his designs for Camaval. The new school of scene-painting in^ Russia is said to have been the inspiration of the painter Wronbel, who, however, did not do much himself, as he died before his ideas were fully accepted. Bakst, Alexandre Benois and N. Roerich took up the work. To Roerich we owe the decors of the ballet The Sac- rifice to the Spring, devised by Nijinsky to carry out the ideas of the cubists, and which aroused storms of hisses whenever it was given in Paris. Alexandre Benois painted the scenes for Petrouchka and also those for Le Pavilion d'Armide. Serge Soudeikine is responsible for the decorations used in La Tragedie de Salome, and Theodore Fedorow- sky painted the extraordinary scenes for Moussorg- sky's music drama. La Khovanchkna. The costumes of the Persian ballet in this opera, of orange, with vivid patches of green and blue, rest in the mem- [154 J Stage Decoration as a Fine Art ory. The art of the Russians, it seems to me, has found nearly complete expression. It is impossible for them to go much further in their violent riots of color, their barbaric impressionism. It is a style particularly suited to the Russian Ballet performances; the eflFect makes a complete whole which those who have seen it cannot erase from the memory. Its practical application to other branches of theatrical entertainment is more difficult. Certain plays of Shakespeare could be dressed in this manner. Certainly The Pirates of Penzance and Patience would be superbly fitted by it; so would the music-dramas of Gluck, Wagner, and Richard Strauss. But there is still another source from which one might set the plays of Shakespeare, leaving aside the best way, which would be to give them in front of screens and draperies in the simplest manner possible. It often has occurred to me while wan- dering through various European galleries that the work of the early Italian painters might easily be adapted to the uses of stage decoration. Flor- ence is full of this sort of thing, but three pictures I remember especially — ^three pictures of the fif- teenth century, by an unknown painter. They are [156] Stage Decoration as a Fine Art small and they hang, with other pictures between them, in one of the long galleries of the UfBzi. Two of them represent feasts. The simplicity and coloring of the architecture and the costumes would be joyously in keeping with certain plays of Shakespeare. The famous Marriage of Boccaccio Advmari with Lisa RicasoU, in the Ancient and Modern Gallery in Florence, is another example. This train of splendid ladies and gentlemen, with a background of old Italian houses, would make as fine a stage pageant as one could wish for. One of its features is a bench with a cloth thrown over it, which would occupy the entire length of the front of the stage. Over this an awning is spread, under which the procession walks. Numberless other examples of first aid to a pro- ducer who wants to do something new with Shake- speare could be mentioned. I cannot resist a pass- ing reference to the frescos of Btenozzo Gozzoli in the Palazzo Riccardi in Florence. The subject of the frescos is The Gifts of the Magi; what the artist has really shown is a Medici hunting party. The paintings, in a perfect state of preservation, depict youths in the most exquisite garments in which any actor could hope to disport himself. [156] Stage Decoration as a Fine Art The combination of the greens, the purples, the blues, and the mulberries, all intertwined with the most lavish use of gold, would make such a stage- picture as has not been seen since the days when a desire for beauty and not a desire for photographic accuracy — ^which always defeats itself — governed those who put drama on the stage. June, IdlJf,. [157] Adolphe Appia and Gordon Craig Adolphe Appia and G. Craig IN the first edition of "On the Art of the Theatre" (1911), Gordon Craig distinguishes himself by killing off Adolphe Appia. In the 1912 edition of the book (and the subsequent edi- tions) he apologizes for his carelessness in a foot- note in which he refers to Appia as "the foremost stage-decorator of Europe." "I was told that he was no more with us, so, in the first edition of this book, I included him among the shades. I first saw three examples of his work in 1908, and I wrote to a friend asking, 'Where is Appia, and how can we meet.'" My friend replied, 'Poor Appia died some years ago.' This winter (1912) I saw some of Appia's designs in a portfolio belonging to Prince Wolkonsky. They were divine, and I was told that the designer was still living." There is no other reference to "the foremost stage-decorator of Europe" in this book. Now, Appia's book, "Die Musik und die Inscenierung," translated from his original French text by Princess Elsa Cantacuzene, with eighteen plates from drawings by the author for the settings for the Wagner music dramas, was issued by F. Bruckmann in Munich in 1899. This [161] Adolphe Appia and Gordon Craig is the book which Hiram Kelly Moderwell refers to in "The Theatre of To-day." Loomis Taylor, last season director of the German works at the Metropolitan Opera House, is also perfectly fa- miliar with it, and he related to me recently how an attempt of his to bring Appia to Germany sev- eral years ago failed. There is no mention made by Gordon Craig of any book by Appia ; Mr. Tay- lor has read only the German text; and even Mr. Moderwell seems to have been ignorant of the fact that a previous work In French had been is- sued by Appia. I have in my possession a small volume (51 pages) entitled "La Mise-en-scene du Drame Wag- nerien," by Adolphe Appia, published by Leon Chailley in Paris In 1893. The sale was after- wards (1895) continued under the Imprint of the well-known publisher, Fischbacher, 33 Rue de Seine. There Is no copy of this work In the New York Pub- lic Library, nor in any other library that I have yet consulted. (The later German work is compara- tively well known among artists of the theatre.) The only reference to It that I have discovered Is in a footnote (Appia seems destined to be exiled to footnotes) In a now little read work by Houston [162] Adolphe Appia and Gordon Craig Stewart Chamberlain, "Richard Wagner," issued in 1897, four years after Appia's pamphlet had first appeared. Appia dedicated "Die Musik und die Inscenierung" to Mr. Chamberlain in this fashion: "a Houston Stewart Chamberlam qui seul connait la vie que j'enferme en ces pages." There is enough interior evidence, without any reference to chronological evidence, to give one cause to presuppose a knowledge on Gordon Craig's part of these books, even the German ver- sion of which appeared before Craig had developed many of his theories. The chronology, for the most part, is damning, for even in the short French book (there is a reference in this pamphlet to the fact that it is a condensed version of a longer work which Appia feared might never see publication) one may find not only the germs but also a com- plete analysis of the principles of modern stage- craft. It was Appia's idea that the stage director should use every effort, by means of the decora- tioti as well as by means of the actor, to bring but the* ^ecret of the drama he was producing. Appia ^was the first to see the inconsistency of placing the actq^ against scenery with painted perspective. It was' Appia who foresaw that lighting should be [163T Adolphe Appia and Gordon Craig used for a more important purpose than mere il- lumination; that it should serve as the element which binds together the decoration and the figure of the actor, a theory which, as Mr. Moderwell points out, was imagined before a lighting system had been devised to make its practical application possible. It was Appia who discovered that al- though Wagner had invented a new form of drama, he had not the slightest notion of how to produce it. He is very explicit here. He says, for ex- ample, that the action of the ordinary opera is determined by convention, that of the spoken drama by life. In other words, the prima donna of opera must sing her airs in conformation with the beat of the conductor, and she may stand as near the footlights as she pleases. No question of art is raised; nor should there be. You cannot improve (beyond a certain very easily discover- able point) The Barber of Seville by superior stage management. In a play the actor tries, as best he may, to imitate life. Between his lines he may take what time he likes to add action to best serve this purpose. In Wagner's Wort-Tondrama (the master's own expression) the music is used for a double new purpose. It illuminates the soul of [164] Adolphe Appia and Gordon Craig the drama, le drame mterieur, and it defines to a nicety the time of the action ("not the duration of time," says Appia, "but time itself"). In other words, the author-composer wished the illusion of ^ his music dramas to be as complete as that of the ( great tragedies of the spoken drama, butf he has " set a definite limit to his characters' actions by^com- posing music which it takes a certain time to per- j form. He takes all liberty away from the actor J without telling him precisely what to do. I Thus Tristan and Isolde, after they have drunk the love- potion, are given a number of moments, songless, to express their emotion in gesture; just as Briinn- hilde, awakened by Siegfried, must continue to greet the sun until the harp stops playing. Ap- pia foresaw that this action must be controlled by one man, who must regulate it to the last detail. He must arrange the scenery and the lights and the action not only to correspond exactly to the demands of the music and the words, but also to bring out to the utmost the underlying meaning of the work. For this purpose he has gone into detail with which it does not seem to be necessary to encum- ber this brief account. In the German work this [165] Adolphe Appia and Gordon Craig detail is, of course, much fuller than in the shorter French version. The German book, besides, is em- bellished with engravings which give one a very good idea of the intentions of the artist-author. Appia, for instance, is not content with making one drawing for the setting of the third act of Die Walkilre; he makes no less than seven. These show the varying condition of the lights and posi- tion of the characters at different stages in the action. Loomis Taylor has called Appia's idea for this setting "the most beautiful that one could conceive." And yet no one, so far as I know, has ever attempted to use it. The Appia case is an extraordinary one. Here we have a man who has not only developed a complete and invaluable theory for the production of a group of dramas, but who has also gone to the pains to outline to the minutest detail the manner in which his ideas may be carried out, and no one has taken the trouble to follow these instructions in the way he intended. Once his work was complete, Appia seemed content. He has now gone on to some- thing else. Before the war began he had identified himself with the Dalcroze school at Hellerau and had gone far beyond practical present-day stage- [166] Adolphe Appia and Gordon Craig decoration methods, evolving still newer theories in cubes. However, may we not consider, with the evidence, that Appia was the innovator of the new movement in the theatre? — ^may we not assure our- selves that without Appia there would have been no Gordon Craig, perhaps no Stanislawsky? His ideas have most certainly been awarded fruition in a thousand forms. I cannot resist a quotation or two in pursuit of my comparison. "Das Rheingold presents three ele- ments: water (the bottom of the Rhine), air (the summit of a mountain separated from Walhalla by the Rhine), and fire (the subterranean forges of the Nibelungs)." Compare this with Gordon Craig's now famous description of the decorations for Macbeth: "I see two things. I see a lofty and steep rockj and I see the moist cloud which envelops the head of this rock. That is to say, a place for fierce and warlike men to inhabit, a place for phan- toms to nest in." But examples in which Appia exacts of the decoration a promise to play a lead- ing role are too frequent to be quoted. One other selection will show how this comparatively (to the public) unknown designer went to work twenty-two years ago to evolve a new f omj of stagecraft : [167] Adolphe Appia and Gordon Craig "The last tableau of Die WdUeiire represents a mountain-top, the favorite meeting-ground of the Valkyries. It is purely decorative up to the mo- ment when the god (Wotan) surrounds it with a circle of flames to protect the sleep of BriinnKilde, but from that instant it acquires a deep signifi- cance. For this sfeep is Wotan's precaution against the workings of his own desire ; that is to say, the god, having renounced his power to direct events, has made the confda/nte of his desil'e impotent. This fact gives the value of a dramatic role to the deco- ration, since the return of the scene in Siegfried and Goiter dii/mmerumg not only constitutes for the eye a unity between the three parts of the trilogy but also always leads the spectator to the vital point in the drama (Wotan's will, active or passive)." Appia's purpose, in evei^y instance, was, working from the general to the particular, to discover the author's intention and then to' illuminate it. The stage director or decorator, in his opinion, was only the clairvoyant slave in the service of the author's text. The leaders of the modern movement in the theatre are in complete accord with him on this point as well as others. August m, 1915. [168]