MUSIC.
RACHMANIN OFF.
ON Thursday of last week, at one of the Promenade Concerts, we were given a performance of Raclunaninoft's Second Symphony, a work which has not, unless I am very much mistaken, been heard in England for some time. Few artists have proved to be ultimately negligible on so large a scale as Rachmaninoff, and this is a teasing realization when one considers how many things this composer had to his advantage. He can almost be said to have invented a particular kind of tune, comIsting in a short phrase mounting, so to speak, on top of itself, and then on top of itself again—a procedure that produces an undeniably strong effect of morbid exaltation ; but not content with enough of what was never a very good thing, he must needs make a formula of it, so that wherever a tune appears in any of his more extended works, it invariably takes this form. Having spoilt one of his assets there remained a considerable gift for musical construction, and a pleasing, though limited, imagination. The first of these two virtues was ruined—at least in this Symphony— by the second. The composer set out to plan the work with a perfectly good set of ideas ; but he never allowed one of them to develop itself before introducing another, with the result that each movement gives a decousu impression that destroys our pleasure. This is the more irritating in that we can feel that the composer really had the faculty of construction, such as would justify him in attempting a work of this length, if only he had not allowed his own musical emotions to hurry him so much. His imagination seems to perform a continual Rodeo ; each item on the programme is exciting enough while
it lasts, but not one of them lasts long enough for the whole of which it is a part to be coherent and interdependent.
I believe (but I am not sure) that this Symphony won the first prize one year at the Moscow Conservatoire, the second being carried off by Scriabin's Poems de l'Extase, a more original, if not less ultimately negligible, work. This fact is instructive ; it points to the unhealthy state of musical opinion during the first ten years of the century—a state which was due, not to Wagner, but to Wagnerism. After Tristan had burst upon the world, composers of every nationality became possessed with a desire to write nerve-racking music that was as foreign, as well in effect as in intention, to Wagner's great work as anything could be. Metaphorically speaking, Rach- maninoff shut himself up in a dark room, frightened himself to death, and then translated his soul-storm into the language of music. Tchaikovsky was another offender of this kind ; so, often, is Strauss. It cannot be denied that they succeed in their object; our nerves are set in a fine jangle, we rush in a swift electric lift up to the top floor of optimism, and descend suddenly and with equal swiftness to the basement of misery, an awful sinking feeling in our stomachs. But we emerge from it all not the better for our experience, but the worse, for our hearts have never once been touched ; our reactions have throughout been purely physical, so that our first idea is to escape from the odious nightmare by which we have involun- tarily been gripped. And this we have no difficulty in doing, for the music itself is essentially ephemeral and has not the compelling power of beauty that never dies in us once we have witnessed it. The glory we may occasionally feel in the course of the work is hopelessly transitory, and there is not a suspicion of severity in the agony we are forced to share. The passion is that of an angry and spoilt child. Like the memory of a thunderstorm the whole vast work fades in our minds, until we are left with nothing but a vague sense that it was all a great pity and that we would much rather have been left alone, thank you very much ! Nobody likes to be moved against his will by something that he knows instinctively to be false and meretricious ; it is a sort of betrayal of oneself, akin to telling a lie with no possible object in view. This voluntary self-betrayal seems to me the only thing of which it may be said that it is definitely immoral, and I look forward to the time when people will be ashamed to listen to Scriabin, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Tod and Verkleirung, and the symphonies of Gustav Mahler.
EDWARD SACKVILLE WEST.
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