MR. HADOW'S MUSICAL ESSAYS.* - WHEN' Schumann was endeavouring to call
into being his Hew Zeitschrift filr Musa, he was moved to lament, in reviewing the difficulties of the situation, how few musicians * Studies in Modern Music. By W. H. Hadow, M.A., Fellow of Worcester ,College, Oxford. London: Seeley and Co. wrote well, and also how few writers were practical musicians. The ground for complaint is almost as great in 1893 as it was sixty years ago; for in the England of to-day, the number of writers who combine adequate musical knowledge with general culture and a style, is ex- ceedingly limited, especially as some of the best-equipped members of that limited band are debarred by lack of leisure from using their pens. This being the case, a cordial welcome is due to Mr. Hadow, who unites to a remark- able and rare degree the qualities of special and general education, coupled with a command of language which enforces attention even where the reader may be inclined to dispute his contentions. This, however, is not likely to be often the case. Mr. Hadow's standpoint is eminently sane, sympa- thetic, and catholic. His admiration for Wagner is compatible with an enthusiasm for Brahms, and his reverence for foreign art does not prevent him from cherishing a firm belief in the future, aye, in the present, of English music. The con- cluding passages of Mr. Hadow's opening chapters on Music and Musical Criticism are excellently illustrative, alike of his attitude and his power of expression. There is nothing blatant in his patriotism, nothing complacent in the optimism of the following retrospect and forecast :— "In music we have allowed generations of foreign influence to obliterate our own national style, with the result that the heart of the people has been left untouched, and that criticism has too often been entrusted to careless or mercenary hands. Music can never flourish as an exotic. If it is to grow into a fair and stately tree, it must be planted in a native soil. We owe our best grati- tude to Germany for the great works that she has put forward for our education ; but in order to appreciate them at all, we must have the root of the matter in ourselves. Much more ; if England is to return to the first rank of European music, she must work upon her own lines, she must deliver her own message. It is false to say that we are unmusical. No unmusical nation could have produced &wrier is i-cumen in, or the Triumphs of Oriana, or King Arthur ; no unmusical nation could have filled its churches with the strength of Tallis or the sweetness of Farrant. At least, we have the traditions of a past in which our composers had no need to borrow from their foreign neighbours?'
Mr. Hadow traces the succession of calamities which begot the evil tradition that England should import her music from abroad, with the result that "the record of our national music, once among the most glorious in the world, has been virtually in abeyance for the past two centuries." Music, amongst us, became "no longer the outcome of the national life, it was an external thing to be bought with money, and to be estimated in proportion to its price." As Mr. Hadow acutely observes on another page, John Bull's unreasoning contempt for the foreigner stood terribly in the way of all national development, once music had come to be regarded as a foreign product. And now for Mr. Hadow's cheering prophecy :— " Now, at last, the period of our decadence is ended. There has arisen amongst us a composer who is capable of restoring our national music to its true place in the art of Europe. Under his guidance and by his example it is still possible that we may rise to the position which we occupied in the time of Elizabeth, and show ourselves once more the worthy comrade and rival of the great nations oversea If only the work can be turned into a right direction, if only it can follow the broad, healthy utterance of our national melodies, instead of diverging to copy the phraseology of an alien tongue, if only it will be true and honest and single-hearted, then there is no reason why it should not recover the glory that it has attained in past days. We do not want overtures that imitate Parsifa, or cantatas that pile into one incongruous heap the cadences of Grieg and Dvorak. We want to realise once again that distinctive National Art of which the capacity is still latent in the heart of our country. There is little presumption in the forecast when we already have such first-fruits as St. Cecilia and the De Profundis, and the English Symphony."
It is for "us listeners," according to Mr. Hadow, to deter- mine whether we will aid this movement or retard it. Of the professional critics, "the accredited captains of the host," he has little hope. And, in good. truth, the history of English musical criticism in the nineteenth century, from the scribes who belittled Beethoven down to the scribes who belittle Brahma, is anything but a reassuring study. All the same, good work was done by some of the most prejudiced of English critics—Mr. Davison, for one, was principally instru- mental in launching the Popular Concerts—and in some respects narrow-minded distrust of. novelty is less prejudicial to the advance of Art than the indiscriminate acclamation of every new-comer. As Rubinstein puts it in his recently pub- lished brochure, "the public has heard and read so often of its own incapacity to recognise a genius during his lifetime, that it is now ready to declare any one a genius out of mere fear of bringing upon itself the reproach of non-recognition."
As regards the literary quality of Press notices, Mr. Hadow's strictures are in a great measure deserved, though we imagine that he, an arm-chair critic, hardly realises his good fortune in not being called upon to dash off a critique of a new symphony, or a new opera, while sitting in the concert- room or the opera-house. The competition of the daily papers in regard to "actuality," and the necessity of writing notices on the night, is largely responsible for the slipshod style in which such work is turned out, and we are very glad to see that the musical representatives of the Times and the Daily Tele- graph—widely differing in their criticisms—are at one on the point of occasionally holding-over notices. On the whole, we are inclined to think that Mr. Miaow takes the shortcomings of the critics too deeply to heart. Our neighbours on the Con- tinent are no better off. For example, the leading German critic, Herr Hanslick, of Vienna, is a resolute opponent of Wagnerian principles ; while the Menestrel, the leading French musical paper, is swayed by political more than by artistic considerations, and rarely praises a work by an author belonging to the nations forming the Triple Alliance. And finally, though our musical critics may be less competent than -their foreign confreres, they are, at any rate, infinitely more honest. Now, in Germany and France, the venality of musical critics is still so notorious that the integrity of a man like Dr. Lessmann is looked upon as something superhuman.
Besides his introductory discourse on method, the gist of which is that all who hold music dear should learn to criticise for themselves, Mr. Hadow gives us three admirably written studies of Berlioz, Schumann, and Wagner. They are at once acute and sympathetic, that on Berlioz, in particular, being a masterpiece of luminous condensation. Mr. Hadow is not one of those critics who, in Schumann's happy phrase, "place ladders against the Colossus, and carefully measure it with yard- sticks." He never obtrudes his technical equipment, deals largely in felicitous metaphor, and has a knack of coining phrases that stick in the memory. The volume, which is illustrated with five admirable portraits, is disfigured, curiously enough, by several aggravating inaccuracies, chiefly in the spelling of French and German words. These should be corrected if, as the book deserves, it finds enough readers to warrant the issue of another edition.
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