DANGER OF SUCCESS

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 139, 16 June 1930, Page 7

DANGER OF SUCCESS

JUTUEE OF COMPOSERS

'•"'"' SPUR /.OF" POVERTY

■■ What is to to the lot of the composer in tho unknowable century More us? ■What will be his relations with the pub1U > What will be his relation to lus art. asks Olin Downcs in the "New York Times." Tl-is new century, of which the World War was only the prelude, will confer upon tho composer an unheard of deWccof temporal-glory and power. To be a successful composer in the future •will mean not only immense material rewards, but also reputation and influence which reach to the four corners of the earth. There is no, question about it. The most -cursory, glance at modern social and mechanistic developments give us.an unmistakable hint of what is to happen. In the near future the composer who is heard in an orchestral concert in Now York will be heard simultaneously by whatever publics desire to listen in countries on the furthest side of the world. All the great performances will be instantaneously recorded. After the new work has been heard—very soon after, as the mechanisms become simplified and perfected— tho new composition and the repealing interpretation will be recorded, .indelibly for the centuries to; come. Discs or other material will make the work and the' performance accessible to ail humanity. ■•'•'. . Theso conditions, in turn, will create immense markets for the composer who has something wanted by tho enormous corporations /which control the productiu of all the music in the world. These corporations will crush the lesser creative talents if they choose to do so, but they will be forced to reckon with inextinguishable genius as surely as the corporation of a railroad has to reckon with King Coal. The long-suffering and long-neglect-ed composer will have his day, his place in the sun, his illusion of grandeur and power, of the same sort which has deluded and destroyed millions of the overgrown children who constitute •the human race. What will this do to the composer? BAD RESULTS. ! In the past it has done him no good, j and great evil. In most cases, whether as a coincidence or a cause, the decline in a composer's creative power has synchronised with Ms period of material success and fame. The examples of Jlichard Strauss, Puccini, Debussy, are too recent to Require emphasis here. CJuite other causes may have operated toward tneir .creative decline than the one we have mentioned. For a,man or an artist rots from within. The inner decay is not perceptible until it hasi ■worked its way through to the smooth and deceptive surface. Then, suddenly, the whole character is seen to have collapsed. What are the sources of such disaster ? The outsiders never precisely know. The man, if he knows it himself, doesn't tell. But it is a fact that the deterioration of the creative personality, which is revealed sooner and more surely in art than anywhere else, -has1 very frequently been contingent upon, the artist's period of prosperity and acclaim. These conditions are the most insidious'and dangerous of all the foes that the composer has to meet. Adversity arid public indifference have in the past visited their penalties upon him, but in the great number of cases ;fchey have strengthened instead of destroyed him, and always they have deepened his understanding of life and lent additional earnestness and depth of meaning to Ms message. If they deprived him of happiness and the security which, always menaces thought and effort, they also threw' him back upon himself and forced him to create from within! himself the things ho did not find about him. A Bach, forced to address a king in terms of servility, and reckoned as considerably lower in the social scale than a bootlegger, creates a B minor Mass and humbly implores the Royal functionary to accept the dedication. ,' DIFFERENT TO-DAY. It is otherwise when an Igor Stravinsky makes a triumphal tour of the city, or of any capital of the civilised world. Nevertheless, we fancy that as-a creative genius, holding in his hand the musical evolutions of the next few centuries, Bach-need not have envied Stravinsky (already declining dangerously from his former position- as the rage and dernier ijri of modern music) . the position which enables him to-day-to dictate his own terms to tho publ lishers. , . ■ _. .' \ One need not romanticise in pointing out these facts, or adduce from the i'arnous examples of Mozart, humiliated ;md forgotten, or Schubert, who lived in penury and dreams all his days. Other composers have fared better. There have been those like Beethoven j iind Wagner, who, under more or less j harassed conditions, possessed the will and the' power to force an indifferent world-"to bend the knee and give them what they- needed for the exercise of iioir, genius. But these ends were at:iiried by "the hardest struggles. There | -as never permanent security and well■'M.ngl' The composer won after fierce iittles with ; rriqn and angels. What is the way out? There is only ■ivc way, and: it must be found, as ■. I always has been found in other periods .of softness and deterioration, by the return of faith and the intrepidity of the human spirit.