THE MUSICAL SHORT STORY

Oamaru Mail, Volume XXVIII, Issue 8091, 8 January 1903, Page 4

THE MUSICAL SHORT STORY

There can be no doubt that'the art-form of the future-for orchestral music is the .sjmphonic. poem as constructed by Liszt, Sainifc-Saens;, and Dvorak (writes H. T. Finck in. the Forum). Dvorak once said to me that in his opinion symphonies should never last over half an hour. He has not quite lived up to his conviction on this point; but ifc is well to have modem composers understand, at any rate, that over-" elaboration is not a virtue, but a vice. Beethoven undoubtedly improved on the symphonies of Haydn andvMozart in many important respects: : There is more thought, and food for thought, in one of his than in. a dozen of theirs. But his doubling the length of the- symphony was a grievous error, which has done a great deal to retard the evolution of music, and has consigned to oblivion many works that might have lived had not their composers, with his example before them, been'tempted to stretch out their material to tedious lengths. As the three-volume novel has had its day, so the four-movement symphony is doomed to extinction. It is too long. Its writers usually labor under the strange delusion that genius consists in taking some insignificant theme and developing it internally with the utmost display of technical skill and ingenuity. Genius, on the contrary, consists in the faculty of originating significant ideas, expressing them in the simplest possible way, and stopping short when all that is new has been said, whether it makes one page or a dozen or more. In architecture there is some excuse for skyscrapers, because if not beautiful, they are at any rate useful and profitable. But long symphonies are the reverse of useful and profitable. A very talented composer, who died six years ago, the -Viennese Anfcon Bruckener, practically wrecked his

.whole career by writing skyscraper symphonies' lasting up to an hour and a half. Sfo conductor dared' to risk the success of a whole concert on such works, and consequently they were ignored, and the poor deluded man died broken-hearted. He had been unable to read the signs of the times. When Richard Wagner was 27 years old, and the music for his first characteristic opera, "The Flying Dutchman," was fermenting in his brain, he wrote a fanciful novelette entitled "a Pilgrimage to Beethoven," in which he took the liberty of making that composer say : "If I were to write an opera after my own mind people would run away, for they would find in it none of the arias, duets, terzets, and all the stuff with which composers now make up their operatic patchwork." Beethoven, of course, never" dreamed of such a thing. It was Wagner himself who discarded the arias and changed the opera from a patchwork, or mosaic, into a work of art organically connected in all its parts _by means of recurring leading motives. Liszt did the same thing for the concert-hail when he invented the symphonic poem, in which one leading thought permeates the whole unbroken piece, and substituted it for the symphony with its four detached movements. Wagner, in his essay on Liszt's symphonic poems, cordially recognised the great improvement he had made by discarding the symphony, with its aboriginal dance and march rhythms and its ' stereotyped structure, and adopting in its place a type of composition based onpoetic motives and capable of endless variety of subject and form. It is for the various reasons here indicated that the tendency of advanced composers has been more and more toward the musical short-story, the symphonic poem. Richard Strauss began as a conservative follower of Beethoven and Brahms, as his first 15 s works, including a symphony, show. 1n.1885 he "shed his skin," and henceforth followed the banner of Liszt and the symphonic poem. He has himself said : "I tun the legitimate successor of Liszt;" and last winter he gave much pleasure and satisfaction in Berlin by conducting for the first time all of Liszt's symphonic poems in chronological order.