THOUGHTS ABOUT MUSIC

Evening Star, Issue 20316, 26 October 1929, Page 22

THOUGHTS ABOUT MUSIC

[Written by “ L.D.A.,” for tho ‘Evening Star.’] Music gives tone to the universe, wings to the wind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, gaiety, and life to everything.—Plato. It has been previously remarked in these columns that musicians are, as a rule, not good business men; but there are notable exceptions, and of these George Frederick Handel, whose immortal oratorio, ‘The Messiah,’ will shortly be given its annual airing by countless choral societies throughout tho world, must be considered almost unique. He went to England with the avowed object of winning fame and fortune; other composers have had similar intentions, out so far as can be ascertained none of them achieved equal financial success. Handel realised very quickly that no more money was to be made by supplying the aristocracy with Italian opera; and with similar astuteness he discerned that the great mass of ' the people would have nothing to do with art unless it was based on something familiar to all. At that time the English public knew their Bible—probably much better than they know it to-day; Solomon. Samson, Saul, Joshua, Moses, and other prominent scriptural characters were as much household words to them as the names of Richard Lion-Heart or Thomas a Becket. So the shrewd George Frederick took these patriarchs to his bosom, and therefrom evolved a great form of musical composition, the oratorio. • • * • , It must be borne in mind that during the eighteenth century money had a much higher value than it possesses to-day. Consequently when Handel received a pension of £2OO per annum from Queen Anne he became quite a well-to-do young man; but when, a fe.v years later, the succeeding Sovereign added a further sum of similar proportions and actually doubled it soon afterwards, Handel was in receipt of an income never dreamed of by Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven. Poor Schubert did not own £IOO in all his life; and Wagner was short of money for many years. However, it was not all beer and skittles for Handel. He had his ups and downs in his closing years; and, in fact, was verging on old age when he made himself immortal, and, incidentally, rich, by presenting to the world his noblest work, ‘ The Messiah.’ With one possible exception it may be said that no composer’s product has oyer been performed a fraction of the innumerable times that sees the revival of this hardy annual. Besides figuring in the regular Yuletide routine ot choral unions, extracts from it are concunently given in choirs and places where they sing; whilst every aspiring vocalist leams one or more air* from it.

This long-suffering oratoria has probably endured more bad performances than the music of any other master; s ? et it manages to survive and come up smiling every year, perhaps, for one reason, that singers enjoy it. Another reason is that the audiences know the scoie almost backwards, and they will condone a poor rendition for the sake of the music itself, which never fails to arouse the same old enthusiasm among its exclusively middle-class adherents. Familiarity with this evergreen work does not breed contempt in the ranks of its admirers; and it would not surprise me if its popularity were to broaden into an even wider circle through the medium of the talkies. There is a promise of grand opera soon on the sound film, so why not oratorio? Possibly then we may get some adequate performances by such organisations as the Sheffield or Birmingham Choirs, instead of the half-pie presentations which restricted conditions make almost inevitable in this country.

Handel’s ,personal appearance is fairly well known, in his handsome wig; but without the wig he looks as different as does Charlie Chaplin minus his moustache. Handel’s wig was, in fact, something exceptional, even at a time when wigs were as numerous as leaves in a Vailambrosa. It has been described as a Kneller wig, of the typo worn by distinguished military men, who, after a battle, would remove tbeir luxuriant tresses and hand them over to their valets to have the bullets combed out!

Handel was in person a large-made and portly man. His gait was somewhat ungraceful, and he sauntered along the street as if ho were a person of abounding leisure instead of being what he really was—a man of most powerful mind, with an impetuous, illimitable capacity for work. He shared, in fact, the characteristic common to all men of true genius—unflagging industry. The ability to write their compositions in an incredibly short space of time is an astonishing circumstance in the lives of nearly all the great masters, of which 1 shall have more to say on another occasion. Handel was no whit inferior m rapidity to his brother composers; it is recorded that he once wrote a complete opera in Ims than a fortnight—indeed, so quickly did the sheets of manuscript fill up under his flying pen that tne poor librettist complained he oouid scarcely keep pace with them. In all, Handel produced about forty operas, twenty oratorios, a large number of anthems, Te Deums, etc., about 150 miscellaneous vocal works, besides a truly enormous quantity of instrumental music. Yet he round time to . saunter 1 It is the fashion to-day in some quarters to belittle this prolific composer, but the belittleinent is only a fashion, and cannot alter the fact that Handel’s work remains an unassailable monument. • * • * The'eightieth anniversary of Chopin’s death occurs this month. It was on October 17, 1849, that the greatest of pianoforte composers passed away at Paris, A legend has grown around his memory to the effect that ho was always more or less in delicate health, and that in consequence his music is mostly of an exotic, not to say neurotic type; whereas the truth is that Chopin was normally strong, if not robust, before the trying life he led in France’s capital broke him down. So far as can be ascertained, he was ill only once prior to his twenty-first year, and in one of his letters to his parents later than that he wrote: "l am told I am getting stouter; anyhow, I feel as strong as a lion.” This does not read like the complaint of a consumptive; as a matter of fact, it was several years afterwards before the fatal disease manifested itself, I have always regarded it as significant that the first onset of the malady coincided with his friendship for George Sand—otherwise Madame Dudevarit. The latter had a son aged about thirteen, whom the doctors had ordered to a warm climate if his life were to be preserved. The inference is obvious; this youth was threatened with tuberculosis, possibly already in its deadly clutches, and Chopin, whose vitality was then at a low ebb through going the pace a bit in Paris, became an easy victim to infection. I cherish the belief that

if novelist and musician had never met the world would be considerably richer to-day, and Chopin might have lived to a ripo old age.

However, we are obliged to take history ah we find it, though speculative ventures into the realm of might-have-been never fail to prove interesting. There will probably never be any agreement on the subject of Chopin’s health after all these years; oven at the time there were differences of opinion. . Berlioz, for instance, once remarked of the famous Polish composer: ■‘II se mourait toute sa vie” (“he was dying all his life”!, but this dictum may be easily attributed to jealous spite. Nowadays, when Chopin’s music is so familiar and absolutely essential to every virtuoso’s repertory, it is certainly strange that it failed in its im mediate appeal when first composed, and that other eminent composers professed to find in it nothing of much consequence. Mendelssohn, for example, never featured any Chopin numbers at his concerts; he admitted his inability to wax enthusiastic over them, and Chopin returned the compliment by remarking that of all Mendelssohn’s works ho admired only the first, * Song Without Words ’ —a statement which, if true, is equally inexplicable. To us, who accept gratefully all that the great masters of music have vouchsafed, these personal idiosyncrasies seem strange and almost past belief. Moscheles, an eminent musician of that day, actually wont so far as to say that Chopin’s modulations were amateurish and harsh, artificial and forced; and even Schumann, who, with Liszt, was one of Chopin’s few champions, called him Ynereiy “ the boldest poetic spirit of our time.” To-day; when all the artistic achievement of that epoch stands out in clear perspective. it retnains indisputably evident that Chopin was from the first a legitimately trained musician of quite exceptional attainments, a pianist of the highest order, and a composer for the pianoforte pre-eminent beyond comparison 1 emphatically differ from these critics, however, who, whilst acclaiming his geniusj are in the habit of disparaging its height and depth by such comments as “his moral nature waa not

cast in a sublime mould,” “his intellect was not profound,” “his bias was romantic and sentimental rather than heroic,” etc., etc. Such platitudes are easily disproved by a close study of such works as the slow movement in the B minor sonata, the polonaise in A flat, and the seldom-heard ‘ Allegro de Concert.’ If these pieces do not reveal sublimity, profundity, and heroism then I must confess to ignorance of the meaning attached to these definitions. Chopin certainly had limitations; he was deficient in contrapuntal knowledge, and his sonatas show a decided weakness in the working-out sections: but they do not, in my opinion, thereby lose anything from the purely musical standpoint. Much solemn balderdash has been written in praise of the strict sonata form, but m truth this kind of musio is often prodigiously dull, and even Beethoven cannot be exempted from this category. One of these days I may summon up courage enough to say what I really think of Beethoven in this connection, but t will suffice here to remark that 1 < .itsider Chopin’s two chief sonatas as worth a couple of dozen of Beethoven's considered purely as music.

But all the greatest masters of musie differ so radically in their methods and output that comparison is really impossible. Ail we are sure of is that : w« receive a mysterious pleasure tram every kind of good music, a pleasure that eludes precise russification or explanation. The very existence of musio is not merely a wonder, it is a miracle. Its domain may be described ’* lying between thought and phenomenon. Like a twilight mediator, it hovers between spirit and matter—related to both, yet differing from each; in fact, music is spirit, but spirit subject to the measurement of time; and .■'ever more are we conscious of these thoughts than when listening to the tone of that' truly immortal laureate of the piano Frederic Chopin. (To be continued.)