On Music
YOHALEM, JOHN
On Music TAKING CRITICAL CHANCES BYJOHN YOHALEM T .Jk. reasure unearthed in a New England church thrift shop: A volume from 1904, Modern Composers of Europe by Arthur Elson, once renowned as...
...Consequently, the preference now is to delve into the past or to try to explain the present...
...But his praise for Mahler is preceded by six pages on Sigmund von Hauseg-ger, whose Barbarrossa every present-day reader can surely hum...
...But he can see through the Master when Strauss comes up with bogus defenses of program music...
...Taking all of Debussy's music, as a whole, it seems that he has often gone too far afield, and lost himself in the devious paths of musical impressionism...
...One can only hope that the thrilling emotions evoked by the music did not pall as quickly as this mawkish prose does...
...Yet he is capable of calling Grieg's imitation-Tchaikovsky piano concerto "wholly original in effect, and the utmost perfection of melodic and harmonic architecture...
...This, out of the dozens that Elson thinks deserving of musical and narrative synopsis, as well as the most fulsome praise...
...Hugo Wolf is cited principally for his now-forgotten opera, Der Corregidor, and Anton Dvorak for his symphonies and tone poems, not the winsome trios...
...A worshipper of Strauss, Elson gives us an entire chapter on him—and this before Salome or any of the other famous operas...
...Of Grieg he tells us: "His wealth of melody and bold richness in new harmonic effects have caused many to name him as the greatest living composer...
...Finland for Jean Sibelius, and Norway for Edvard Grieg...
...The new public of the swelling cities was no longer content with chamber music at home, Italian opera and the odd virtuoso recital...
...What became of them...
...Nevertheless, one cannot help noticing—and being a mite envious of—Elson's exuberant optimism about the general interest in the compositions of his contemporaries...
...Overexposure to orchestral excerpts from Wagner seems to have short-circuited all young composers' abilities to hear music other than as embroidery for a story, an artifact, a character, a sentiment...
...Strauss claims: "Musicians have all done the same...
...Happy man, he did not foresee how soon Debussy would be loved, and audiences would walk out before the world premiere of a tone poem tucked in at the end of a program...
...Tone poems were even more popular in 1904, the ponderous legacy of Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner...
...There was little gap between audiences and critics...
...The result is at first perfectly incomprehensible to many, but on repeated hearing and study his works show a weird, elusive charm that is worshipped by the modern decadents...
...Elson was all in favor of this emphasis, and goes so far as to divide Modern Composers by country—quick, how many Dutch composers can you name...
...Wagner had demonstrated what a glorious thing it was to be a composer...
...He could be a reigning hero, a great philosophic thinker, a prophet...
...In Elson's day, however, the audience for larger and complex forms was more widespread and devoted than ever before...
...Still, from Verdi on composers liked to imagine they were expressing national aspirations...
...The sheer number of bright, eager and mostly forgettable composers is not startling...
...Witnessing so dazzling a career, every musician dreamed of achieving the same glory...
...Spain for a footnote on Isaac Albeniz...
...Grieg has since been rightly discarded as a charming mediocrity...
...Much safer...
...He hobnobbed with Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, was adulated by a nation, was enormously well-paid and, posthumously, was canonized by critics and musicologists...
...The operas—pardon me, music dramas—except for a few exotics set in India or Japan, are on vaguely mythical, semi-Nordic themes: Reyer's Sigurd, Chabrier's Gwendoline, Goldmark's Merlin, Franck's Hulda, Buongior-no's Cuor delle Fanciulle, d'Indy's Fervaal...
...His praise of Elgar, for instance, as a "great and original genius" does not seem as far-fetched currently as it would have 20 years ago...
...There had been as many in Mozart's time, there are as many now...
...He could presume, even after many years of journalism, that the American public longed to know every name, every work and every trend of Europe's music scene...
...There are three chapters on Germans, naturally, and one on Richard Strauss alone...
...Puccini's music is still lacking in some of the more delicate touches needed for such a libretto...
...Like a species with no natural enemies, they proliferated until their excess numbers caused a famine of material...
...While the comparison with Beethoven would have been devastating for Grieg, Elson has an excuse...
...Smetana's Ma Vlast survives, as do the Strauss poems, Sibelius' Kalevala (in bits), and Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain...
...Of one composer he effuses, "In his works the dominant feeling is one of melting tenderness, of warm sentiment that seems never to lose its charm...
...after The Ring, no one would be satisfied with a composition as small and quiet as a sonata...
...Every piece of music he discusses is "weirdly effective," "remarkably impressive," "of the most luscious charm," or possesses "a simple grandeur," "a plaintive sweetness," or is "a rare beauty...
...Ultimately, though, Grieg's concerto is shallow...
...There is only one chapter on Italy, fallen on hard times, but Puccini, not yet a colossus, is already the clear favorite —though of his forgotten dustcatcher, Madame Butterfly, Elson sternly cautions: "The failure of Mascagni's Iris should have shown the difficulty of setting a Japanese subject...
...It was rare in 1904 to hear all five Beethoven piano concertos unless one was a traveler, and even then one would not hear them often...
...And kick myself in a decade...
...He is often deliciously garish in his acclaim of duds...
...Hooray for the dry-eyed critic...
...The critic's summaries reveal them for the Wagner rejects their titles indicate...
...In a book with, at the minimum, a word or two on every noteworthy composition by each of several hundred composers, Elson is asking for trouble...
...Elson will mention a sonata as an afterthought...
...There was an obsession, too, with size to the exclusion of all else...
...Then to England for Edward Elgar...
...Every critic ought to be willing to state his views as confidently as Elson does, whatever the risk...
...They have come to fear that a single mistake will make them look silly, no matter how frequently they may be proven right...
...Elson pronounces them "of rare beauty" (of course) "shapely works," "stirring themes," "excellent ofthe type...
...Unlike Elgar, There is little chance of the Norwegian composer being restored to general favor...
...The revolt and subsequent turn of later generations to a totally abstract music that made no attempt to please audiences with melodies or restful basic keys was, perhaps, understandable...
...Though Elson's pages are filled with trite phrases, turgid discussions of deservedly forgotten composers and lapses of judgment, behind all this one can can glimpse a happier world, long gone, in which high art also was the popular art...
...True, Haydn and Mozart used their folk heritage, as did Scarlatti in Spain, but the 19th century saw the quickening interest in the local...
...Indeed, there is a downright glut of rare beauties...
...Elson mentions 38...
...Apparently musicians felt the familiar themes had been exhausted...
...Elson, albeit too rarely prescient, nonetheless has the virtue of being winningly foolhardy...
...And that's only ApresMidi d'un Faun...
...Elson therefore discusses long lists of opera composers and tone poets...
...We get 26 pages on the pre-operatic Richard Strauss, and only one of them concerns his songs...
...Music critics have on the whole ceased to write prognostic tracts that declare which composers will be in the pantheon for all eternity...
...He muses on "a musician of great gifts" who "chooses to imbue all his music with a studied vagueness of effect, and wander through a maze of ever-changing keys and harmonies...
...the cheapness of the melodrama may not be instantly apparent...
...In the El-sonian tradition, I shall predict who shall join the immortals...
...At the turn of the century a composer was no longer simply a romantic artist starving in a garret...
...reasure unearthed in a New England church thrift shop: A volume from 1904, Modern Composers of Europe by Arthur Elson, once renowned as the doyen of Boston music critics...
...Oneof the great masterpieces of the modern school____" What can it have been like...
...In addition, Grieg's tunefulness pleases any ear receptive to melody...
...A whole chapter on "Bohemia" is devoted to Smetana and Dvorak...
...We are coming to appreciate Elgar's stubborn late romantic honesty, disdaining the contempt that in its time was a reaction to the composer's inflated status as the grand old man of English music...
...And to prove I'm not just talking, in the months ahead I will consider in this space recent recordings and performances of living American composers, remarkable for their rare beauty, luscious charm, and simple grandeur...
...Elson evidently appreciated the virtues of Dream of Gerontius and the Enigma Variations...
...Every conceivable theme was ransacked: Wagnerian folklore, natural scenery, Biblical tales, the seasons, even Hiawatha...
...For one thing, he soon runs out of des-criptives...
...Elson counters: "The suites of Bach tell no story...
...even Beethoven...
...real composers wrote big...
...This was due in large part to Wagner, only 20 years dead when Elson's book was published...
...Beethoven himself, Strauss to the contrary notwithstanding, did not always aim to elucidate a plot in his lofty measures...
...Elson never suspected how close he was to the end of an era, but he had begun to hear puzzling strains...
...Surprisingly, since the book was produced before the furor that attended the westward migration of Diaghilev and his troupe, two chapters are devoted to Russians: Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, Cui, Balakirev, Borodin, plus such youngsters as Scriabin and Rachmaninoff...
...T o his credit, Elson does pick out Gustav Mahler from dozens of ardent German symphonists and devotes five pages to his first five symphonies...
...Of course, he could not hear it on elevators, nor did he have it available on a recording to compare with Beethoven's five piano concertos...
...Symphony orchestras were founded in every city worthy of the name, and patrons insisted on at least some tone poems and Germanic operas —the avant-garde of the time...
...Nonetheless, Elson's ear was not that bad...
Vol. 63 • November 1980 • No. 21
