Mencken Chrestomathy (Vintage)

by H. L. Mencken

  BEETHOVEN was one of those lucky men whose stature, viewed in retrospect, grows steadily. How many movements have there been to put him on the shelf? At least a dozen in the hundred years since his death. There was one in New York in 1917, launched by idiot critics and supported by the war fever: his place, it appeared, was to be taken by such prophets of the new enlightenment as Stravinsky. The net result of that movement was simply that the best orchestra in America went to pot—and Beethoven survived unscathed. Surely the Nineteenth Century was not deficient in master musicians. It produced Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Wagner and Brahms, to say nothing of a whole horde of Dvořáks, Tschaikowskys, Debussys, Verdis and Puccinis. Yet it gave us nothing better than the first movement of the Eroica. That movement, the first challenge of the new music, remains its last word. It is the noblest piece of absolute music ever written in the sonata form, and it is the noblest piece of programme music. In Beethoven, indeed, the distinction between the two became purely imaginary. Everything he wrote was, in a way, programme music, including even the first two symphonies, and everything was absolute music.

  It was a bizarre jest of the gods to pit Beethoven, in his first days in Vienna, against Papa Haydn. Haydn was undeniably a genius of the first water, and, after Mozart’s death, had no apparent reason to fear a rival. If he did not actually create the symphony as we know it today, then he at least enriched the form with its first genuine masterpieces—and not with a scant few, but literally with dozens. Tunes of the utmost loveliness gushed from him like oil from a well. More, he knew how to manage them; he was a master of musical architectonics. But when Beethoven stepped in, poor old Papa had to step down. It was like pitting a gazelle against a bull. One colossal bellow, and the combat was over. Musicians are apt to look at it as a mere contest of technicians. They point to the vastly greater skill and ingenuity of Beethoven—his firmer grip upon his materials, his greater daring and resourcefulness, his far better understanding of dynamics, rhythms and clang-tints—in brief, his tremendously superior musicianship. But that was not what made him so much greater than Haydn—for Haydn, too, had his superiorities; for example, his far readier inventiveness, his capacity for making better tunes. What lifted Beethoven above the old master was simply his greater dignity as a man. The feelings that Haydn put into tone were the feelings of a country pastor, a rather civilized stockbroker, a viola player gently mellowed by Kulmbacher. When he wept it was with the tears of a woman who has discovered another wrinkle; when he rejoiced it was with the joy of a child on Christmas morning. But the feelings that Beethoven put into his music were the feelings of a god. There was something olympian in his snarls and rages, and there was a touch of hell-fire in his mirth.

  It is almost a literal fact that there is not a trace of cheapness in the whole body of his music. He is never sweet and romantic; he never sheds conventional tears; he never strikes orthodox attitudes. In his lightest moods there is the immense and inescapable dignity of the ancient prophets. He concerns himself, not with the transient agonies of romantic love, but with the eternal tragedy of man. He is a great tragic poet, and like all great tragic poets, he is obsessed by a sense of the inscrutable meaninglessness of life. From the Eroica onward he seldom departs from that theme. It roars through the first movement of the C minor, and it comes to a stupendous final statement in the Ninth. All this, in his day, was new in music, and so it caused murmurs of surprise and even indignation. The step from Mozart’s Jupiter to the first movement of the Eroica was uncomfortable; the Viennese began to wriggle in their stalls. But there was one among them who didn’t wriggle, and that was Franz Schubert. Turn to the first movement of his Unfinished or to the slow movement of his Tragic, and you will see how quickly the example of Beethoven was followed—and with what genius. There was a long hiatus after that, but eventually the day of November 6, 1876, dawned in Karlsruhe, and with it came the first performance of Brahms’ C minor. Once more the gods walked in the concert-hall. They will walk again when another Brahms is born, and not before. For nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man. What ails the music of all the Tschaikowskys, Mendelssohns—and Chopins? What ails it is that it is the music of shallow men. It is often, in its way, lovely. It bristles with charming musical ideas. It is infinitely ingenious and workmanlike. But it is as hollow, at bottom, as a bull by an archbishop. It is the music of second-rate men.

  Beethoven disdained all their artifices: he didn’t need them. It would be hard to think of a composer, even of the fourth rate, who worked with thematic material of less intrinsic merit. He borrowed tunes wherever he found them; he made them up out of snatches of country jigs; when he lacked one altogether he contented himself with a simple phrase, a few banal notes. All such things he viewed simply as raw materials; his interest was concentrated upon their use. To that use of them he brought the appalling powers of his unrivaled genius. His ingenuity began where that of other men left off. His most complicated structures retained the overwhelming clarity of the Parthenon. And into them he got a kind of feeling that even the Greeks could not match; he was preëminently a modern man, with all trace of the barbarian vanished. Into his gorgeous music there went all of the high skepticism that was of the essence of the Eighteenth Century, but into it there also went the new enthusiasm, the new determination to challenge and beat the gods, that dawned with the Nineteenth.

  The older I grow, the more I am convinced that the most portentous phenomenon in the whole history of music was the first public performance of the Eroica on April 7, 1805. The manufacturers of programme notes have swathed that gigantic work in so many layers of banal legend and speculation that its intrinsic merits have been almost forgotten. Was it dedicated to Napoleon I? If so, was the dedication sincere or ironical? Who cares—that is, who with ears? It might have been dedicated, just as well, to Louis XIV, Paracelsus or Pontius Pilate. What makes it worth discussing, today and forever, is the fact that on its very first page Beethoven threw his hat into the ring and laid his claim to immortality. Bang! – and he is off. No compromise! No easy bridge from the past! The Second Symphony is already miles behind. A new order of music has been born. The very manner of it is full of challenge. There is no sneaking into the foul business by way of a mellifluous and disarming introduction; no preparatory hemming and hawing to cajole the audience and enable the conductor to find his place in the score. Nay! Out of silence comes the angry crash of the tonic triad, and then at once, with no pause, the first statement of the first subject—grim, domineering, harsh, raucous, and yet curiously lovely—with its astounding collision with that electrical C sharp. The carnage has begun early; we are only in the seventh measure. In the thirteenth and fourteenth comes the incomparable roll down the simple scale of E flat—and what follows is all that has ever been said, perhaps all that ever will be said, about music-making in the grand manner. What was afterward done, even by Beethoven, was done in the light of that perfect example. Every line of modern music that is honestly music bears some sort of relation to that epoch-making first movement.

  The rest of the Eroica is Beethovenish, but not quintessence. There is a legend that the funeral march was put in simply because it was a time of wholesale butchery, and funeral marches were in fashion. No doubt the first-night audience in Vienna, shocked and addled by the piled-up defiances of the first movement, found the lugubrious strains grateful. But the scherzo? Another felonious assault upon poor Papa Haydn! Two giants boxing clumsily, to a crazy piping by an orchestra of dwarfs. No wonder some honest Viennese in the gallery yelled: “I’d give another kreutzer if the thing would stop!” Well, it stopped finally, and then came something reassuring—a theme with variations. Everyone in Vienna knew and esteemed Beethoven’s themes with variations. He was, in fact, the rising master of themes with variations in the town. But a joker remained in the pack. The variations grew more and more complex and surprising. Strange novelties got into them. The polite exercises became tempestuous, moody, cacophonous, tragic. At the end a har
sh, hammering, exigent row of chords—the C minor Symphony casting its sinister shadow before.

  It must have been a great night in Vienna. But perhaps not for the actual Viennese. They went to hear “a new grand symphony in D sharp” (sic!). What they found in the Theater-an-der-Wien was a revolution.1

  Schubert

  From the American Mercury, Nov., 1928, pp. 284–86

  FRANZ SCHUBERT, at least in Anglo-Saxondom, has evaded the indignity of too much popularity. Even his lovely “Serenade,” perhaps the most moving love-song ever written, has escaped being mauled at weddings in the manner of Mendelssohn’s march from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and Wagner’s from “Lohengrin.” It is familiar, but not threadbare: I have listened to it within the past week with new delight in its noble and poignant melody, its rhythmic and harmonic ingenuity, its indescribable Schubertian flavor. Nor is there anything stale about nine-tenths of his piano music, or the songs. The former is played very little—far, far too little. The latter are yowled in all the music studios of the world, but the populace remains unaware of them, and so they manage to hold their dignity and charm. “The Erl King” and “Who is Sylvia?” have become familiar on the air, but surely not many of the remaining six hundred.

  Schubert, indeed, was far too fine an artist to write for the mob. When he tried to do it in the theater he failed miserably, and more than once he even failed in the concert-hall. There is the case, for example, of “Heidenröslein,” to Goethe’s words. Goethe wrote them in 1773 and J. F. Reichardt set them in 1793. In 1815, a year after Reichardt’s death, Schubert made a new setting. Was it better—that is, considering the homely words? No; it was harder to sing, but not better. Twelve years later the text was reset again by Heinrich Werner, a composer so obscure that even Grove’s Dictionary is silent about him, but a man, obviously, with all the gift for simple, transparent melody of a Friedrich Silcher. When “Heidenröslein” is sung today it is to Werner’s melody, not Schubert’s.

  Great stretches of Schubert’s music, indeed, remain almost unknown, even to musicians. Perhaps a hundred of his songs are heard regularly in the concert-hall; the rest get upon programmes only rarely. Of his chamber music little is heard at all, not even the two superb piano trios, the octet, and the quintet with the two ’cellos. Of his symphonies the orchestras play the Unfinished incessantly—but never too often! – and the huge C major now and then, but the Tragic only once in a blue moon. Yet the Tragic remains one of Schubert’s masterworks, and in its slow movement, at least, it rises to the full height of the Unfinished. There are not six such slow movements in the whole range of music. It has an eloquence that has never been surpassed, not even by Beethoven, but there is no rhetoric in it, no heroics, no exhibitionism. It begins quietly and simply and it passes out in a whisper, but its beauty remains overwhelming. I defy anyone with ears to listen to it without being moved profoundly, as by the spectacle of great grief.

  Schubert paid the price that all artists pay for trying to improve upon the world made by the gods. “My compositions,” he once wrote in his diary, “spring from my sorrow.” Biographers, finding that sorrow in the lives of their victims, search for its sources in objective experience. They hunt, commonly, for the woman. Thus such a colossus as Beethoven is explained in terms of the trashy Giulietta Guicciardi. It is not necessary to resort to these puerilities. The life of an artist is a life of frustrations and disasters. Storms rage endlessly within his own soul. His quest is for the perfect beauty that is always elusive, always just beyond the sky-rim. He tries to contrive what the gods themselves have failed to contrive. When, in some moment of great illumination, he comes within reach of his heart’s desire, his happiness is of a kind never experienced by ordinary men, nor even suspected, but that happens only seldom. More often he falls short, and in his falling short there is agony almost beyond endurance.

  We know little directly about what Schubert thought of his compositions. He was, for a musician, strangely reserved. But indirectly there is the legend that, in his last days, he thought of taking lessons in counterpoint from Simon Sechter. The story has always appealed pleasantly to the musical biographers; mainly ninth-rate men, they delight in discovering imbecilities in artists. My guess is that Schubert, if he actually proposed to seek the den of Sechter, did it in a sportive spirit. Going to school to a pedant would have appealed charmingly to his sardonic humor. What Sechter had to teach him was precisely what a Hugh Walpole might have taught Joseph Conrad, no less and no more.

  It is astonishing how voluptuously criticism cherishes nonsense. This notion that Schubert lacked skill at counterpoint seems destined to go on afflicting his fame forever, despite the plain evidence to the contrary in his most familiar works. How can anyone believe it who has so much as glanced at the score of the Unfinished? That score is quite as remarkable for its adroit and lovely combinations of melodies as it is for its magnificent modulations. It is seldom that one is heard alone. They come in two by two, and they are woven into a fabric that is at once simple and complicated, and always beautiful. Here is contrapuntal writing at its very best, for the means are concealed by a perfect effect. Here is the complete antithesis of the sort of counterpoint that is taught by the Sechters.

  No doubt the superstition that Schubert had no skill at polyphony gets some support from the plain fact that he seldom wrote a formal fugue. There is one at the end of his cantata, “Miriams Siegesgesang,” and in his last year he wrote another for piano duet. The strict form, however, was out of accord with the natural bent of his invention: he did not think of terse, epigrammatic subjects, as Bach did and Beethoven afterward; he thought of complete melodies, the most ravishing ever heard in this world. It would be hard to imagine his making anything of the four austere notes which Beethoven turned into the first movement of the C minor symphony. He would have gone on to develop them melodically before ever he set himself to manipulating them contrapuntally. But that was not a sign of his inferiority to Beethoven; it was, in its way, a sign of his superiority. He was infinitely below old Ludwig as a technician; he lacked the sheer brain-power that went into such masterpieces as the first movement of the Eroica and the allegretto of the Seventh. Such dizzy feats of pure craftsmanship were beyond him. But where he fell short as an artisan he was unsurpassed as an artist. He invented more beautiful musical ideas in his thirty-one years than even Mozart or Haydn, and he proclaimed them with an instinctive skill that was certainly not inferior to any mere virtuosity, however dazzling and however profound.

  This instinctive skill is visible quite as clearly in his counter-point as it is in his harmony. Throwing off the pedantic fetters that bound even Bach, he got into polyphony all the ease and naturalness of simple melody. His subjects and counter-subjects are never tortured to meet the rules; they flow on with a grace like that of wheat rippled by the wind. The defect of prettiness is not in them. They show, at their most trivial, all the fine dignity of Schubert the man. Beautiful always in their simple statement, they take on fresh and even more enchanting beauties when one supports another. There are passages in the Unfinished, especially in the first movement, that are almost unparalleled in music, and there are passages equally fine in compositions that are seldom heard, notably the aforesaid quintet. When Schubert died the art of writing so magnificently seemed to pass out of the world. It was not until the colossal figure of Brahms arose that it found another master.

  He was, to music, its great heart, as Beethoven was its great mind. All the rest begin to seem a bit archaic, but he continues to be a contemporary. He was essentially a modern, though he was born in the Eighteenth Century. In his earliest compositions there was something far beyond the naïve idiom of Mozart and Haydn. Already in “The Erl King” there was an echo of Beethoven’s fury; later on it was to be transformed into a quieter mood, but one none the less austere. The man lived his inner life upon a high level. Outwardly a simple and unpretentious fellow, and condemned by poverty to an uneventful routine, he yet walked with the
gods. His contacts with the world brought him only defeat and dismay. He failed at all the enterprises whereby the musicians of his day got fame and money. But out of every failure there flowed a masterpiece.

  In all the history of music there has never been another man of such stupendous natural talents. It would be difficult, indeed, to match him in any of the other fine arts. He was the artist par excellence, moved by a powerful instinct to create beauty, and equipped by a prodigal nature with the precise and perfect tools. The gabble about his defective training probably comes down to us from his innocent friends and fellows in Vienna. They never estimated him at his true stature, but they at least saw that there was something extraordinary and even miraculous about him—that what he did could not be accounted for logically, but lay far beyond the common bounds of cause and effect. We know next to nothing about his mental processes. He was surrounded by inferiorities who noted with wonder how savagely he worked, how many hours a day he put in at his writing-table, and what wonders he achieved, but were too dull to be interested in what went on inside his head. Schubert himself was silent on that subject. From him there issued not even the fragmentary revelations that came from Mozart. All we know is that his ideas flowed like a cataract—that he knew nothing of Beethoven’s tortured wooing of beauty—that his first thoughts, more often than not, were complete, perfect and incomparable.

  No composer of the first rank has failed to surpass him in this way or that, but he stands above all of them as a contriver of sheer beauty, as a maker of music in the purest sense. There is no more smell of the lamp in his work than there is in the lyrics of Shakespeare. It is infinitely artless and spontaneous. But in its artlessness there is no sign of that intellectual poverty which so often shows itself, for example, in Haydn. Few composers, not even Beethoven and Bach, have been so seldom banal. He can be repetitious and even tedious, but it seems a sheer impossibility for him to be obvious or hollow. Such defects get into works of art when the composer’s lust to create is unaccompanied by a sufficiency of sound and charming ideas. But Schubert never lacked ideas. Within the limits of his interests and curiosities he hatched more good ideas in his thirty-one years than all the rest of mankind has hatched since the beginning of time.