Music in France and Germany

...in Paris it was, relatively speaking, a fiasco...

...In phrases strikingly like those employed by exclu- sionists today, Governor Patrick Gordon back in I727, was viewing with alarm the wholesale immigra- tion of Germans occurring at that time...

...He and a group of artists animated by similar convictions compose in the spirit of an entirely new polyphony, and therefore in the spirit of an objective and organic form...

...Certainly they seem to have been harmless enough...

...with this is associated the suppression of chromatic harmony, to replace which a diatonic harmony is pro- posed...

...This constituted a reaction from Wagner in so far as Debussy, basing his effort on the aesthetic sensualism of his race, sought to liberate music of all literary and philosophic pretensions and so to reach a position basically different from romanticism...

...I am speaking here of Strauss not only as an individual instance, in so far as his power of creative invention seems to have flagged since (let us say) Die Frau ohne Schatten, but also of Strauss as the representative and sponsor of a ten- dency...

...The more gen- eral and important reaction comprised, however, a surrender of all traditional forms, a repudiation of all tonality, the "atonalism" of the musical Bolsheviks...

...to the Germans these were not so imperatively necessary...

...The admis- sion into the orchestra of such "musical instruments" as the siren, the klaxon, the merry-go-round gong and the rattle was sufficient demonstration that all was now permitted...

...It had become the caviar of epicures...

...but attempts to make jazz serve high art have not been infrequent, though hotly debated, in Germany...

...If then music has been able to bring us to such trends of thought it is because this music is, on the one hand, the most fervent of the arts excepting poetry and so feels the nearness to or remoteness from God that characterizes an epoch, and on the other hand re-mains, when genuine at all, necessarily a genuine child of its own particular age...

...Subsequent history made him out rather a poor prophet...

...Naturally this new music was a form of expression having only temporary significance for the French ear, which would inevitably find it somewhat barbaric in the end...

...So far as I am able to judge, this influence has been nil in France...

...He too refined form to the ultimate degree, and even over-sharpened it...

...His ideal has been strict polyphony, the contrapuntal style...

...and I remember that The Com- monweal commented upon it at length...

...The governor and the assembly, chronically at odds, found themselves for once in substantial agree-ment, and a law was passed in I729 which may be regarded as one of the ancestors of American immi- gration-restriction legislation based on race discrimi-nation...

...Nevertheless impressionism did make an entry into German music...

...We must observe that he, of the three, was destined to exert the great- est influence upon foreign countries, including France...

...Views of the world are not considered articles of export, but this case of Wagner is proof to the con-trary...

...With this tendency one must associate Richard Strauss, the third of our leading contempo- rary composers...

...These new arrivals were rendered particularly obnoxious by the circumstance, noted by Logan, that there were "divers Papists among them...

...Krenek, however, is still disposed to caper...

...This period, the ter-rible hour of awakening from dreams, destroyed so many true and false ideals that a violent attack upon all idealism and upon an art remote from reality was then inevitable...

...The German artist, manifesting in his good work no less than in his bad a deep inwardness and a dis- position to dream, is inclined to be romantic and, in a measure, to neglect strict form for the sake of content and expression...

...In Franklin's own day, one of this "dull, credulous and ignorant" stock, Frederick A. Muhlen- berg, acquired a sufficient knowledge of our language and government to enable him to serve as Speaker of the first House of Representatives under the fed- eral constitution...

...In short, unless the stream of their importation could be turned from this to other colonies, they will soon so outnumber us that all the advantages that we have will, in my opinion, be not able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious...

...and succeeding generations of Penn...

...In the case of France the incentive came, once again, from a foreign source, and indeed--as the French fondness for the ballet renders easily understandable--from the Russian ballet...

...july 3, i9z 9 THE COMMONWEAL 25i MUSIC IN FRANCE AND GERMANY By KARL SCHAEZLER S INCE music is less able than its sister arts to express plastic ideas, the value of the informa- tion it supplies to cultural and spiritual history, or even to criticism of the contemporary mind, is gen- erally ignored...

...Then too, even those who take no heed of the basis supplied to all polyphonic music as such by views of the world, can hardly fail to dis- cern here something like an approach, even though it be as yet a quite remote and timid approach, to NATIONAL ORIGINS By FRANK the Thomistic and so also to the Catholic ideal of art...

...To the German taste, however, it seemed to contain something purposively evanescent and passive...

...ferent in character from it as Wagnerianism and impressionism...

...These culminate in a demand for simplicity of form...

...There is ample testimony to their industry, thrift, tractability...

...And when one sees that side by side with this the Gregorian choral once again attained to importance (the Schola Cantorum was founded in Paris during 1894 ) one can guess how deeply this traditionally Catholic, century-old, cultural treasure must have been embedded in the French spirit in order that a then so old-fashioned melodic form should have cropped out between forms so dif...

...Darius Milhaud has a prefer- ence for a really very radical polyphony...

...Accordingly, this drastic and frankly discriminatory provision becomes part of the law on July I, committing us as a nation to racial selection--or rather rejection--within the white race as a method of choosing new population...

...Whatever its immediate inspiration--a question that puzzles politi- cal observers--Senator David A. Reed's attitude is in line with a long-standing tradition in the common-wealth he represents...

...But the extent to which it can reflect the individuality of a nation, a culture, a time spirit, is shown clearly in the development of French and German music during the past eighty years...

...In the realm of symphonic poetry and of song writing (so essential a part of German music) conditions are quite similar...

...In a letter to Peter Collinson he expresses the opinion that "measures of great temper are necessary with the Germans," and goes on to call them indiscreet, dull, credulous, ignorant and of inaccessible prejudices...

...The manner in 252 THE COMMONWEAL July 3, 1929 which this change then took place is an aspect of the most interesting part of this entire historical develop- ment...

...For he and Debussy had, apparently, discov- ered so much promising virgin territory that there could be no dearth of imitators, gifted and otherwise --in Germany Erich Korngold and Franz Schreker, for example...

...These have, in part, gone close to the limit of the possibilities latent in the tendency they espoused, and so have themselves rendered necessary a change, the imminence of which was indicated by the curious irony which not infrequently comes to the fore in Ravel himself and most noticeably in Satie...

...Romanticism, and in particular the romanticism of the Bayreuth master, is accordingly im- printed upon German opera not merely until the time of Richard Strauss's first attempts at dramatic com-position, but even as late as the most recent work of Hans Pfitzner, the second among the three greatest German composers to have appeared thus far in the twentieth century...

...Very likely jazz is too remote from us ever to render possible a final synthesis, however fruitful it may eventually prove to rhythm...

...As yet everything is manifestly in a process of formation...

...Here are expressed not only the characteristic differences exist- ing between two peoples, but also (in what the two tendencies share in common) that unity inside the European plurality which is not completely submerged even today, and of which the citizen of the continent is often less aware than are residents of other parts of the world...

...IN PENNSYLVANIA RAHILL p RESIDENT HOOVER has failed in his efforts to secure a further postponement of the appli-cation of the provision in the Immigration Act of I924 calling for the substitution of the census of I89 o for that of I9Io as a basis for computing "national origins...

...It has a familiar ring: Not being used to liberty, they know not how to make a modest use of it...

...yet even he has never proceeded in such conscious repudiation of Wagner as did those French composers who began to write when he did...

...Impressionism, for its part, was quite as remote from life...

...In the work of the impressionists, the French missed in particular clarity and translucency of form...

...It is true that our time needs a new polyphony, and this could not as yet have crystallized to the point where it constituted so nicely adjusted a system as that of old classical music...

...As late as i753 even so liberal a spirit as Benjamin Franklin permits himself to be disturbed about them...

...The leading sponsors, however, were the "group of six," the spirit animating whom has been most happily expressed by Georges Auric and Francis Poulenc...

...And so there followed a plunge into tonal asceticism and abstraction, as in the musical technic of Arnold Sch6nberg and his pupils...

...Both are symptomatic of the fact that our time, pagan though it may seem at first sight, con-ceals certain inclinations toward Catholicism which might flower into fruit if they ended in Catholicism...

...and so this final evolution progressed slowly into the years of restoration which followed the war...

...It was Claude Debussy who helped impressionism to victory with his opera, Pell~as et M61isande...

...Yet though, owing to his incomparable mastery of form, he affected the future more strongly than did Debussy, it seems at present that the trend of events has hastened beyond him too...

...The law was short-lived and had scant effect, but it is significant of the strength of the sentiment in those early days...

...Paul Hindemith as well as Ernst Krenek were, originally, anarchists of this type...

...Something still more funda- mental, however, came to the surface here: a dis-carding of the speculations of subjectivism and an acknowledgment of the evidence for objectivity...

...What fascinated the French was primarily the elemental simplicity of the rhythm and the wild natural force in which this music differed so pro-foundly from the spiritualized artistry and super-sensitiveness of Debussy...

...The first turned, however, to a highly valuable, firmly controlled endeavor and is rightly considered a notable factor in very recent German musical activity...

...The turning-point therefore came even prior to the war in France, but in Germany followed that war...

...Then Arthur Honegger, Swiss in origin, portrayed the chugging of a locomotive symphonically in Pacific 231 and ulti- mately quite abandoned the principles of the group...

...Instrumental musicians as original as Anton Bruckner and Hugo Wolf could not escape Wagnerian influence, and Brahms, whose work is usually held to be at the opposite pole from Wagner's, is nevertheless an out-and-out romantic in his own way...

...His art is distinguished for opalescent blending of the subtlest tints, for mellow twilight, and for exquisite sensitiveness...

...and so it never really found a home in Germany where the public lacked ability to under-stand it...

...It is therefore unavoidable that in so brief a survey as this paper attempts to make, a large group of less important incidents must remain un-noticed in order that the major aspects of the situa- tion may become, in a measure, clear...

...Max Reger, the third of our three outstanding contemporaries, kept resolutely aloof, it is true, from the Wagnerian style...

...The compass readings are the same in both cases: repudiation of the subjectivism of the nineteenth century as that was couched in an over-refined harmony, and so also of the tendency to emphasize feeling too strongly...

...Ac-cordingly, more than art was involved in the circum- stance that reaction from Wagner came more quickly and forcefully in France than among us in Germany...

...in France Maurice Ravel and Eric Satie...

...The immediate occasion of Gordon's alarm was the arrival of IO9 Palatines, one of the numerous groups of Germans who followed Pastorius to Penn's land-- Philadelphia being a main port of entry...

...The coincidence of this development with the revival of Thomistic philosophy is of course no acci-dent...

...on the other hand, a turning to more objective, more July 3, I929 THE COMMONWEAL 233 generally valid forms, in particular to counterpoint and polyphony, the renewed attractiveness of which is indicated also in the contemporary Bach renaissance...

...We are in the midst of a period of transition, but its unsatisfactory character-istics must not lead us to forget or minimize the ideal striven for...

...Since lost wars are frequently trailed by revolutions, it is not surprising that so tremendous a catastrophe as was experienced by the German people in 1918 should have meant the unleashing of all the energies which were struggling to move forward...

...Ameri-cans have been given the opportunity to form an opinion of Jonny Spielt Auf, the jazz opera which is his best-known work...

...Now, if I may credit a letter received from Romain Rolland, France was "musically poor" during the nineteenth century, while Germany possessed a towering genius in Richard Wag- ner...

...But "inter arma silent musae...

...and there is no doubt that his work is the artistic expression of a definite Weltanschauung...

...The premiere of Igor Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps (Paris, 1913) was an epochal event...

...He ex-pressed his concern for the peace and security of the province, which "might be endangered by such num-bers of strangers daily pouring in, who, being igno- rant of our language and laws, make, as it were, a distinct people from His Majesty's subjects...

...Thus music in both countries is moving toward related goals, and even the developments themselves have more in com- mon than is apparent at first sight...

...A highly respected conservatory (Frankfurt) even sought to establish its own school of jazz, thereby raising a storm of indignation...

...in Germany movement and ferment are still stronger, but a certain settling--yes, even an effort to establish a new classicism--is now a not negligible factor in its musical life...

...Meanwhile this opera has been superseded by another equally hotly contested piece, for which a travesty of John Gay's familiar Beggar's Opera supplied the libretto--a com-position radical in every respect, which was purposely served up in Leipzig on Christmas DayI) Here the question of the influence of jazz upon art music had already been touched upon...

...and, finally, the purging of emphasis and all romanticism generally is advocated...

...Upon it, as is worthy of notice in this connection, one of the out- spokenly Catholic poets, Jean Cocteau, exerted a strong influence...

...To the French artist on the other hand, clarity and architectonic structure are more im- portant than all else, and formal harmony and there- fore classicism more natural...

...Appropriately enough, it was a senator from Penn- sylvania who effectually blocked a reconsideration of this vexing question of national origins in the current extraordinary session of Congress...

...This Jonny was played many times in all parts of Germany amid enthusiastic applause and bitter denunciation...

...It is significant enough that a similarly important rSle was given to polyphonic music--and to a historic form of it, the Palestrina style--during the course of the French reaction from Wagner...

...But this romanticism, in company with impression- ism, dominated music in Germany virtually without challenge until after the war...

...He dominated French musical life during whole decades as completely as he did German musi- cal life...

...It imposed a head tax of forty shillings on all foreigners (non-English, that is) admitted to the colony...

...Yet apprehension on their account persisted, with nothing more formidable to sustain it than their num- bers and clannishness...

...Penn's colony, founded ex-pressly as "an asylum for the oppressed of all nations," by a curious irony, early became a hotbed of antlallen sentiment and long remained such, in spite of the heterogeneous composition of its popula- tion and in the face of the substantial debt it owes to the enterprise and industry, the brains and the brawn of successive waves of immigration...

...And so we reach an interesting conclusion: in France the work of clarification seems to have progressed relatively farther (it was there aided by the genius loci and external circumstances...