DR. HUEFFER'S MUSICAL ESSAYS.*
IT is much to be regretted that, by the premature removal of Dr. Hueffer, these essays have been put forth without the final revision of which they stand so sorely in need. The very title is a misnomer, conveying as it does the impression that some attempt would be made to trace the growth of English music. This, however, is done in the most perfunctory way. In his preface the author remarks,—" As a matter of courtesy, I have given the pas to the great foreign masters who have visited our shores during the period under notice." As a matter of fact, they occupy almost the entire ground traversed in the volume before us. When he adds that it is his intention to discuss " how they have permanently influenced the current of English Music," he further leads his readers to suppose that his selection of foreign visitors will include those who have left some appre- ciable trace on the development of English music. Instead of which, he gives us distinctly to understand that Wagner's influence is in posse rather than in esse ; that the gospel according to Liszt has as yet fallen on deaf ears ; and that Berlioz's work has left no deep or abiding trace on the minds or workmanship of English musicians. Of Men- delssohn's influence little or nothing is said ; on the indelible impress which has been left on the minds of our best native musicians by the genius of Brahms—who has never visited England at all—Dr. Hueffer is silent. Wagner and Liszt and Berlidz attracted him not merely by their music, but by their writings and theorising. Their importance and significance as factors in the development of English music, were estimated by him, to start with, from a purely automorphic standpoint. It is as though he had said,—` Because this trinity of modern composers are my favourites, they ought to be the favourites of the English public.' But on investigating the matter with "such care and minuteness of research" as had not, to his know- ledge, "been previously bestowed upon so interesting a subject," Dr. Hueffer was driven to conclude, as we have seen above, that these great men had left little or no trace on the minds or work- manship of English musicians,—quod non erat demonstrandum. This negative and unsatisfactory result proceeds chiefly from the mistake of confining his survey to the musicians who have visited our shores. No doubt the prestige of the production of a work is often enhanced by the presence of its creator, more particularly if there is anything magnetic about his per- sonality. But, after all, a composer's physical presence is a very minor matter. We can all of us understand and appre- ciate Berlioz's burning desire to see Weber ; but he would not have admired his music any the more for the sight of its creator. On the contrary, personal contact with genius often brings with it sad disillusionment. Dr. Hueffer attributes the neglect with which Wagner was received in this country when he first visited it in 1839, to the fact that he was a " poor, un- known, and struggling man." He might have added, a repellent one. Mendelssohn's rapid success was largely due to his accessibility and genial manners. On the occasion of his last visit to this country, Liszt was greeted with an extrava- gance of enthusiasm which often bordered on the grotesque. Dr. Hueffer describes this as proceeding in great part from " genuine admiration of his music." With this estimate we cannot for one moment concur. In four out of five persons it was a mere blind, gushing excitement. The people who feel genuine enthusiasm are a very small number. But, in any case, the personality of the creative artist is often a deceptive and misleading thing. Where they combine the interpretative with the creative faculty, as Liszt did, or as Rubinstein does, they are enabled to exert an influence that for the moment is magical and overwhelming. This is what misleads even so intelligent a critic as Dr. Hueffer into the belief that this momentary magic is an abiding influence. Liszt appealed to the imagination and emotions of his • Haf.aCentury of Music in England, 1837.1887: Essays Towards a History. By Francis Hneffer. London : Chapman and Halt
auditors as perhaps hardly any other artist of the century, George Eliot waxed positively effusive over him in her letters. His romantic history, his amiably Mephistophelian appearance, his great social gifts, all conspired to enlist the interest of that sex which enormously preponderates in the concert-hall and the music-room. But, to be just, Liszt was not merely a ; he was really chivalrous and manly, unlike so many of his confreres whose pugilistic feats are solely performed upon the keyboard. "I shall never forget his appearance," wrote a distinguished musician of one of his last performances in public in this country; "it was truly noble. His massive head was like that of a splendid sphinx. There was no gesture or motion, even when he was playing most rapidly and ener- getically. It was calmness and dignity itself." He was, in fine, a most remarkable man and an incomparable pianist. As to his merits as a composer, his works undoubtedly con- tain some green and refreshing oases of melody amid arid Saharas of intolerable cacophony, which are all the more welcome for their exceeding rarity. But, on the whole, we are far more inclined to side with the off-hand estimate of Fanny Kemble which annoyed Dr. Hueffer so much,—" Liszt never composed any very good music,"—than with his own extravagantly high opinion of Liszt's claims to immortality as a creative genius.
Apart from the error of restricting the scope of his inquiry tl those musicians who have come into actual contact with the English public, Dr. Hueffer has committed the great mis- take of imagining that the broad results of any artistic contact or communion are to be discovered immediately. The master-minds by whom English musical art has been chiefly and most healthily influenced during the last fifty, aye, five-and-twenty years, have not been those of Liszt and Berlioz, but rather those of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms. As for Wagner, he may be regarded as having created and exhausted a new form of art, and for this very reason—as standing outside the normal evolution of music—his influence is not so stimulating as that of less colossal minds. As Dr. Hueffer truly says, Wagner can neither be ignored nor imitated. But his vaticinations as to the possible dawn of an era of the music of the future in England seem to us wide of the mark. Music is always music of the future. Haydn was, in all probability, as unintelligible to many sincere lovers of music in his day, as Brahma is to too many of his contemporaries, including Dr. Hueffer. Rossini was charged with innovations in orchestration, just as Wagner was forty years later.
The opening chapter, which dwells on " General Music during the Queen's Reign in England," is, on the whole, a readable resume, though impaired by the author's strong preference for disquisition over fact, and marred by a good many inaccu- racies. Dr. Hueffer is, we think, quite mistaken in con- struing the frank confession of inability to appreciate music which many otherwise cultivated English people make, as a studied insult to the art. He praises the Queen for her unprejudiced encouragement of all schools of music, and then complains of the lavish shower of knighthoods bestowed on English musicians. The appropriateness of the epithet we fail to discover. On p. 21, Dr. Hueffer remarks that " Ars vera est res severa is evidently the principle of both teachers and taught " at the Royal College of Music. He is presumably quoting from memory the legend painted up in the Gewandhaus at Leipzig, Res severa est serum gaudium, in its turn a more diffuse version of the Greek maxim, XaAtirre TCL zetAci. Dr. Hueffer's mention of living English composers is noticeable for a good deal of disputable criticism. He deliberately states that he is prepared to class Mr. Cowen's symphonies amongst the best specimens of that class of composition that could be produced by any living master at home or abroad.
Without implying any disparagement to Mr. Cowen's facile nd often graceful pen, we must be allowed to state that sut.h a remark could only have proceeded from one who had so, little sympathy with symphonic music as the last few pages, of the book prove Dr. Hueffer to have felt. Within a brief compass, he has there managed to compress an astonishing 'arrant of inaccurate or inapt disquisition on what he is pleased to call an " accidental " form. First of all he remarks that N" Beethoven felt the necessity of the poetic idea when he wrote ,the last movement of the Ninth Symphony, the design of which cannot be explained from any canons of the established classical form." The italics are ours.
As a matter of fact, the finale is a set of variations strictly according to rule; and against the assertion that Beethoven only felt the necessity of the poetic idea occasionally, may be set the fact that he expressly told Mr. Neate that he always worked to a picture or definite idea. The above quotation is followed by a page of sheer fiction as to the plan of a new Symphony, according to a programme which was found in Beethoven's desk after his death. As a matter of fact, nothing of the sort was found. Dr. Hueffer has confused one of the pre- liminary sketches for the Ninth Symphony, before Beethoven hit on Schiller's " Ode to Joy," dating back to 1818, with a programme for a Tenth Symphony, drawn up just before his death. Dr. Hueffer proceeds "without hesitation" to class the symphony among " accidental" things. This strikes us as an extraordinarily infelicitous remark. How can any- thing be " accidental" which has had such a long course of development ? When one thinks of the simple, naive, straightforward productions of Haydn, and compares them with those of Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahma, one wonders how Dr. Hueffer could ever have written such a word. "It is in no sense final," he proceeds; "it is not even, in my opinion, perfect of its kind. It lacks balance. Think of these [P three] movements in quick time opposed to a single one in which the most musical, most melancholy element can find appropriate expression !" To this we would answer that the melancholy can and does find expression in the quick movements as well. Dr. Hueffer seems to argue as if rapidity of utterance precluded all possibility of pathos. The quick movement of the Ninth Symphony is one of the most mysterious things that was ever written. Is there no melan- choly in the first movement of the " Eroica," or in the scherzo and trio of No. 7 ? " It is by no means astonishing," continues Dr. Hueffer, "that in almost every symphony in existence the weakest movement is the last." This may be true of Schumann, but it will not hold good in the case of certainly six out of Beethoven's nine symphonies. It is absolutely incorrect of Schubert and Mendelssohn.
The chapter on " Wagner in England " is interesting, but its value is lessened by the attempt which so many admirers of that composer persist in making,—the attempt to exact for the man the admiration which is readily accorded to the musician. Dr. Hueffer dwells on Wagner's domestic devotion, explains away the incident of the kid-gloves which he put on when conducting the works of Mendelssohn; treats of his aversion to the Jews as purely theoretic ; extols his gratitude to the Queen and Prince Albert, and his disinterested love of Art generally, with which view it is difficult to reconcile his own statement of the aims he had before him in writing Rienzi. Wagner was, according to Dr. Hueffer, " a prince and ruler of men." He was also, as is shown in the Wagner-Liszt correspondence, a prince of begging-letter writers. Dr. Hueffer alludes to this collection as a " unique memorial ;" but he is apparently quite unable to see what a very sorry figure Wagner cuts in it by the side of Liszt. In reference to the latter, Dr. Hueffer makes a curious remark :—" A slight ingredient of insincerity belongs almost of necessity to genius when it is brought into contact with the public." It may have been true of Liszt, but we totally fail to see where the necessity comes in. On p. 137 we learn that Liszt played when he was asked to. Hitherto, we always believed that it was precisely then that he refused to play. Dr. Hueffer 'is wrong, by-the-way, in saying that Liszt improvised on Schubert's " Divertissement h l'Hongroise" at the reception given by Mr. Walter Bache on April 8th, 1886. It was no improvisation. He played the finale of the piece in question, and then his own Hungarian Rhapsody in A minor.
The chapter on "Berlioz in England" is perhaps the beat in the book. There is more of fact and less of disquisition in it. With many of Dr. Hueffer's estimates we find it difficult to concur, as, for example, the extravagantly eulogistic terms in which he speaks of the scene d'amour in Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet. His strictures on Berlioz, again, for placing Tom Moore among the great pathetic poets of the world, seem to us very wide of the mark. Berlioz was attracted by the sentiment and melody of Moore. The fact that he never said a.word of Shelley or Keats, Coleridge or Wordsworth—whom, by-the- way, Dr. Hueffer cruelly misquotes on p. 197—is scarcely to be wondered at in a Frenchman. Elsewhere, Dr. Hueffer calla Chopin the Keats of music. Surely the force of ineptitude could go no further than this exquisitely infelicitous parallel. If we have dwelt at length on the shortcomings of this volume,
it has been from no ignoble desire to pick holes in the work of one who is no longer alive to defend himself. It is im- possible to adopt the De mortuis nil nisi bonum principle in literature when a posthumous work is unfair to the living. Believing as we do that the principles advocated in these essays are generally unsound, and the estimates contained therein are coloured by partisanship, we have felt it our duty to combat the one and traverse the other.
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