Second Mencken Chrestomathy

by H. L. Mencken

  Romain Rolland’s “Beethoven” is based upon a thesis that is of almost inconceivable inaccuracy, to wit, the thesis that old Ludwig was an apostle of joy, and that his music reveals his determination to experience and utter it in spite of all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Nothing could be more absurd. Joy, in truth, was precisely the emotion that Beethoven could never conjure up; it simply was not in him. Turn to the scherzo of any of his trios, quartettes, sonatas or symphonies. A sardonic waggishness is there, and sometimes even a wistful sort of merriment, but joy in the real sense—a kicking up of legs, a light-heartedness, a complete freedom from care—is not to be found. It is in Haydn, it is in Schubert and it is often in Mozart, but it is no more in Beethoven than it is in Tschaikowsky. Even the hymn to joy at the end of the Ninth Symphony narrowly escapes being a parody on the thing itself; a conscious effort is in every note of it; it is almost as lacking in spontaneity as (if it were imaginable at all) a limerick by Augustus Montague Toplady.

  Nay; Ludwig was no leaping buck. Nor was it his deafness, nor poverty, nor the crimes of his rascally nephew that pumped joy out of him. The truth is that he lacked it from birth; he was born a Puritan—and though a Puritan, by a miracle, may also become a great man (as witness Herbert Spencer and Beelzebub), he can never throw off being one. Beethoven stemmed from the Low Countries, and the Low Countries, in those days, were full of blue-nosed refugees from England; the very name, in its first incarnation, may have been Barebones. If you want to comprehend the authentic man don’t linger over Rolland’s fancies but go to his own philosophizing, as garnered in “Beethoven, the Man and the Artist,” by Friedrich Kerst. There you will find a collection of moral banalities that would have delighted Jonathan Edwards—a collection that might well be emblazoned on gilt cards and hung in Sunday-schools. He begins with a naïve anthropomorphism that is now almost perished from the world; he ends with solemn repudiation of adultery.… But a great man, my masters, a great man! We have enough biographies of him, and talmuds upon his works. Who will do a full-length psychological study of him?

  De Profundis

  From the Baltimore Evening Sun, Nov. 19, 1928

  A hundred years ago today, in Vienna, Franz Schubert died. He was one of the greatest geniuses the world has ever seen, but he was a poor man, and so his funeral was very modest. At first his father, who was a schoolmaster, planned to bury him under the floor of a parish church, but some one suggested that a more suitable place would be somewhere near Beethoven, who had died the year before. So a grave was found in the Währing cemetery, and there he was planted, and still rests. His funeral cost 70 florins. When, a week or so later, his estate was listed for the public records, it was found to be worth 60 florins. Thus he died bankrupt.

  But it is not to be assumed from this that Schubert, in life, had been unknown, or neglected. Far from it. His immense talent was recognized when he was a boy of 15, and by the time he was 25 he was already something of a celebrity. The Viennese certainly had ears: they could hear his music, and hearing it was enough to convince anyone that it was good. But Schubert himself was the sort of man who, in all societies and at all times, finds it hard to get along. He was so modest that it was simply impossible for him to push himself; he even shrank from meeting Beethoven, who needed only a glance at his songs to see his genius. Worse, he wrote so much that he constantly broke his own market. There were always stacks of Schubert manuscripts in waiting, and so the publishers paid very little for what they took. This fecundity ran to almost incredible lengths. In fifteen years Schubert wrote more than 1,200 compositions, some of them full-length symphonies. His songs run to at least 600, and he wrote the astonishing number of 146 in a single year, 1815. In the August of that year he wrote 29, and on one day he wrote 8. It seems unbelievable, but it is a fact. Some of these songs were better than others, but not one of them was downright bad. The best are among the imperishable glories of the human race. They are wholly and overwhelmingly lovely. No one has ever written lovelier.

  Schubert was poor, but he had what must have been, at least in its externals, a pleasant life. A bachelor at large in the most charming of cities, with a father and brothers who appreciated him and plenty of amiable friends, he had a daily round that was quite devoid of hardship. All morning he would work at his desk, as steadily and busily as a bookkeeper. When he finished one composition he would start another, sometimes on the same page. Most men, completing so formidable a thing as a string quartette, are exhausted, and have to resort to drink, travel, politics or religion for recuperation. But not Schubert. He simply began an opera or a mass. At 1 o’clock or thereabout he would knock off for the day and go to dinner at a restaurant, usually the one called “Zum roten Kreuz”—the Red Cross. It was a cheap place, but the food was good and the beer was better. Like most bachelors, Schubert never dined alone. There were always agreeable companions, mainly young musicians like himself. They would remain at table for hours, and then Schubert would take a walk. In the evening he and his brothers and their friends made music. They started with a little family orchestra, but it grew so large that the family home could not contain it, and it moved to the larger house of an acquaintance. It played almost every night. Schubert usually played the viola, but sometimes he was the pianist.

  This was his routine from October to June. In summer he wandered about the Danubian countryside, usually with a friend or two. They were always welcome, and had many more invitations than they could accept. They would go to this or that country house, stay a week, and enchant the family and other guests with their music. Schubert would often write something for the occasion. It was thus that he produced his superb setting to Shakespeare’s “Who Is Sylvia?” It was thus that he wrote most of his German dances—waltzes and Ländler. He composed a great many more of these dances than he ever put upon paper. He would sit at the piano and they would flow from his fingers by the hour. Those that survive are all very beautiful.

  Schubert thus had little need for money, and hence made an easy mark for the music publishers. He sold some of his songs to them for as little as 20 cents. Now and then, pulling himself together, he resolved to make a stake, and usually, on such occasions, he wrote an opera. But his operas were always failures, and most of them never got to the stage. A successful opera composer is half musician and half clown; sometimes the clown part of him is two-thirds, or even nine-tenths. Schubert had no talent in that direction. He was an artist, not a showman. Much of his best music he never heard played, save by the family orchestra. This was true even of his Unfinished Symphony, one of the noblest works in the whole range of music. He wrote the two movements that we have six years before his death, but then abandoned it, and it did not become generally known until long afterward. His great C Major fared even more badly. In 1844 the London Philharmonic put it into rehearsal, but the members of the orchestra, for some unknown reason, laughed at it, and it was shelved until 1856. After Schubert’s death so many of his unpublished songs began to appear that many persons suspected his brother Ferdinand of forging them.

  But Schubert, in life, wasted little time worrying about the fate of his music. He wrote it, not to entertain concert audiences, but to please himself, and out of that fact flowed a great deal of its magnificent merit. It is, in large part, so familiar to the musicians of today that they often overlook its astounding originality. Not infrequently one finds anticipations in it—even of Wagner!—but it is almost wholly bare of reminiscence. Schubert’s harmonies were unlike the harmonies of any composer who had gone before him. They were not only different; they were better. His melodies differed enormously from those of his forerunners. He did not look back to Mozart and Haydn: he looked forward to Brahms. Maybe Beethoven influenced him. There are, indeed, indications that way in the Tragic Symphony, written in 1816, and especially in the slow movement. But Beethoven would have been proud of that slow movement if he had written it himself—and it remains, in the last analysis, pure Schubert. No one else, before or sin
ce, could have done it.

  As I have said, Schubert led a placid and care-free life. Now and then he was on short commons, and had to double up in lodgings with a friend or two, but that was no hardship for a young bachelor. He knew a great many pleasant people, male and female, and they admired him and made much of him. The gals were not un-appreciative of him, though he was surely no beauty. He loved good wine, and got down many a carboy of it in his time. Vienna was gay and charming, even when there was war—and the war was over before he was nineteen. Nevertheless, such stray confidences as we have from him indicate that he was given to melancholy and often fell into cruel depressions. His music, he once wrote in a diary, came out of the depths of his sorrow. The fact is written all over it. It is sometimes sparkling, but it is very seldom merry. Schubert wrote some of the most dark and sombre music ever written—for example, the “Winterreise” cycle, the last movement of the Unfinished, the slow movement of the Tragic, the first movement of the quintette with the two ’cellos, and such songs as the familiar Serenade. Even his scherzi tend to be gloomy, as witness the two in the octette.

  Love? Heartache? A haughty wench? Hardly. Schubert’s contemporaries heard of nothing of the sort. To them he was simply Schwammerl, a care-free and charming fellow, handy with the girls and a capital companion at the Biertisch. They forgot, seeing him every day, that he was also an artist—one of the greatest, indeed, ever known in the world. They forgot that an artist forges his work out of his inner substance by a process almost cannibalistic—that the price of beauty is heavy striving and cruel pain—that all artists, at bottom, are forlorn and melancholy men. They had Beethoven before them, wracked and consumed by his own vapors, but they were too close to Schubert to see into him.

  Thus artists pay for what they give us. Schubert got off easily. He was dead at 32, and behind him trailed a series of almost incomparable masterpieces. His genius was of the first caliber. Dead a hundred years, he remains as alive as the child born yesterday. Out of his dark moods came treasures that belong to all of us. He increased the stature and dignity of man. He was one of the truly great ones.

  Dvořák

  From the Smart Set, July 1914, p. 160

  My earnest advice to all those who dismiss “From the New World” as no more than a piece of musical journalism, is that they get the score of it and give it prayerful study. They will find writing of the highest quality in it—the music of a man who had something to say, and who knew how to say it. And if they will then turn to Dvořák’s “Dumky” trio, they will get a lesson in musical clarity, dignity and economy of means. Here the composer runs the whole gamut of moods, and yet he never finds it necessary to yell like a Comanche Indian, or to weep like Marguerite Gautier, or to pile up senseless technical difficulties, to assault the ear with bizarre dissonances, or to depart from the keys and scales of “The Well-Tempered Clavier.”

  Tschaikowsky

  From the same, p. 159

  Turn from Tschaikowsky’s “Manfred” or his “Pathetique” to Mozart’s “Jupiter,” or to Schubert’s “Unfinished,” or Beethoven’s Eighth: it is like coming out of a kaffeeklatsch into the open air, almost like escaping from a lunatic asylum. The one unmistakable emotion that much of this modern music arouses is a hot longing for form, clarity, coherence, a tune. The snorts and moans of these pothouse Werthers are as irritating, in the long run, as the bawling of a child, the rage of a disappointed job seeker, the squeak of a pig under a gate. One yearns unspeakably for a composer who gives out his pair of honest themes, and then develops them with both ears open, and then recapitulates them unashamed, and then hangs a brisk coda to them, and then shuts up.

  Russian Music

  From the American Mercury, Jan., 1924, pp. 120–21. A review of MY MUSICAL LIFE, by Nikolay Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakoff, with an introduction by Carl Van Vechten; New York, 1923

  This is the full story—meticulous, humorless, full of expository passion—of the Immortal Five: Balakireff, Cui, Musorgski, Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakoff himself. The book is enormous, and details are piled on without the slightest regard for the reader’s time and patience. One plows through exhaustive criticism, often highly waspish, of concerts given fifty and sixty years ago; one attends to minute discussions of forgotten musical politics. Nevertheless, the general effect of the tome is surely not that of boredom. It somehow holds the attention as securely as Thayer’s monumental “Beethoven” or the memoirs of William Hickey. And no wonder, for the world that the good Nikolay Andreyevich describes is a world that must always appear charming and more than half fabulous to Western eyes—a world in which unfathomable causes constantly produced unimaginable effects—a world of occult motives, exotic emotions and bizarre personalities—in brief, the old Russia that went down to tragic ruin in 1917. Read about it in the memoirs of the late Count Witte, and one feels oneself magically set down—still with one’s shoes shined, still neatly shaved with a Gillette!—at the court of Charlemagne, William the Conqueror, Genghis Khan. Read about it in Rimsky-Korsakoff’s book, and one gets glimpses of Bagdad, Samarkand and points East.

  The whole story of the Five, in fact, belongs to the grotesque and arabesque. Not one of them had more than the most superficial grasp of the complex and highly scientific art that they came so near to revolutionizing. Balakireff, the leader, was a mathematician turned religious mystic and musical iconoclast; he believed until middle age that writing a fugue was, in some incomprehensible manner, as discreditable an act as robbing a blind man. Cui was a military engineer who died a lieutenant general. Borodin was a chemist with a weakness for what is now called Service; he wasted half his life spoiling charming Russian girls by turning them into lady doctors. Musorgski was a Guards officer brought down by drink to a job in a railway freight-station. Rimsky-Korsakoff himself was a naval officer. All of them, he says, were as ignorant of the elements of music as so many union musicians. They didn’t even know the names of the common chords. Of instrumentation they knew only what was in Berlioz’s “Traité d’Instrumentation”—most of it archaic. When Rimsky-Korsakoff, on being appointed professor of composition in the St. Petersburg Conservatory—a typically Russian idea!—bought a Harmonielehre and began to experiment with canons, his fellow revolutionists repudiated him, and to the end of his life Balakireff despised him.

  Nevertheless, these astounding ignoramuses actually made very lovely music, and if some of it, such as Musorgski’s “Boris Godunoff,” had to be translated into playable terms afterward, it at least had enough fundamental merit to make the translation feasible. Musorgski, in fact, though he was the most ignorant of them all, probably wrote the best music of them all. Until delirium tremens put an end to him, he believed fondly that successive fourths were just as good as successive thirds, that modulations required no preparation, and that no such thing as a French horn with keys existed. More, he regarded all hints to the contrary as gross insults. Rimsky-Korsakoff, alone among them, was genuinely hospitable to the orthodox enlightenment. He learned instrumentation by the primitive process of buying all the orchestral and band instruments, and blowing into them to find out what sort of sounds they would make. The German Harmonielehre filled him with a suspicion that Bach, after all, must have known something, and after a while it became a certainty. He then sat down and wrote fifty fugues in succession! Later he got tired of polyphony and devoted himself chiefly to instrumentation. He became, next to Richard Strauss, the most skillful master of that inordinately difficult art in Europe. Incidentally, he and his friends taught Debussy and Schoenberg how to get rid of the diatonic scale, and so paved the way for all the cacophony that now delights advanced musical thinkers.

  A curious tale, unfolded by Rimsky-Korsakoff with the greatest earnestness and even indignation. A clumsy writer, he yet writes brilliantly on occasion—for example, about the low-comedy household of the Borodins, with dinner at 11 P.M. and half a dozen strange guests always snoring on the sofas. Is there a lesson in the chronicle, say for American composer
s? I half suspect that there is. What ails these worthy men and makes their music, in general, so dreary is not that they are incompetent technicians, as is often alleged, but that they are far too competent. They are, in other words, so magnificently trained in the standard tricks, both orthodox and heterodox, that they can no longer leap and prance as true artists should. The stuff they write is correct, respectable, highly learned—but most of it remains Kapellmeistermusik, nay, only too often mere Augenmusik. Let them give hard study to this history of the five untutored Slavs who wrote full-length symphonies without ever having heard, as Rimsky-Korsakoff says, that the seventh tends to progress downward. Let them throw away their harmony-books, loose their collars, and proceed to write music.

  The Bryan of Bayreuth

  From the American Mercury, Nov., 1933, pp. 382–83

  Wagner’s merits, I believe, were mainly on the technical side. Though he was always, judged by conservatory standards, an amateur with only the most sketchy training in the elements of his craft, he became in the end the most stupendous musical technician who ever lived. There is in his scores an almost appalling virtuosity. So great, indeed, was his skill that he disdained most of the tricks that other composers resort to. His harmony was colorful and pungent but essentially orthodox, and there is no sign in it of the sensational cacophony that has since become the rage. His melody was almost as undistinguished, and he seems to have picked up from Beethoven the notion that very little of it was enough for an ingenious man. As for his instrumentation, though there was a considerable boldness in it, and it made extraordinarily heavy demands upon the performers, it still fell short of the bizarre inventions of Berlioz, the one composer among his contemporaries, save Johann Strauss, whom he seems to have respected. But with these meagre, and often downright austere materials, he yet managed to achieve astounding effects. Consider, for example, the prelude to “Lohengrin.” It sounds banal enough today, and in melody and harmony there was surely nothing very novel about it, even in 1850, but when it was first heard even the retired Hofräte of Weimar must have gathered that something extraordinary was before them. Its virtue lies in its sheer virtuosity; it is the work of a man who is the complete master of his materials, and can do things with them, naturally and easily, that are quite impossible to other men. To compare it to the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony would be, of course, to flatter it, but nevertheless the two works belong roughly to the same class; both are the products of musicians who were so superbly competent that they could throw the ordinary devices of their craft overboard, and perform miracles in a sort of vacuum. The leap from Weber to “Lohengrin” was enormous, and yet there was nothing in “Lohengrin” that was not implicit in Weber—nothing, that is, save the hard, ever-ready, overwhelming brilliance of a man who was as far beyond Weber, technically speaking, as Weber was beyond a rustic Stadtpfeiffer.