A Musical Night (The Opera, The Promenades)

________________________________________________
Title:     A Musical Night (The Opera, The Promenades)
Author: Thomas Burke [More Titles by Burke]

AT THE PIANO

Cane chairs, a sleek piano, table and bed in a room
Lifted happily high from the loud street's fermentation;
Tobacco and chime of voices wreathing out of the gloom,
Out of the lilied dusk at the firelight's invitation.
Then, in the muffled hour, one, strange and gracious and sad,
Moves from the phantom hearth, and, with infinite delicacies,
Looses his lissome hands along the murmurous keys.

Valse, mazurka, and nocturne, prelude and polonaise
Clamour and wander and wail on the opiate air,
Piercing our hearts with echo of passionate days,
Peopling a top front lodging with shapes of care.
And as our souls, uncovered, would shamefully hide away,
The radiant hands light up the enchanted gloom
With the pure flame of life from the shadowless tomb.

For a few months of the year London is the richest of all cities in the matter of music; but it is only for a few months. From the end of August to the end of October we have Sir Henry Wood's Promenade Concerts. From the end of May to mid-July we have the Grand Season at Covent Garden. Interspersed between these, at intervals all too rare, we have individual concerts at the Queen's, Steinway, and Æolian Halls; sometimes an Autumn Season of opera or Russian ballet; and the Saturday and Sunday concerts, the former at the Albert and Queen's Halls, and the latter, under the auspices of the Sunday League, at pretty well every theatre and music-hall in London and the suburbs.

There are, however, long spells of emptiness when nothing or little is doing in musical London, and that little hardly ever at night, though Sir Thomas Beecham, the greatest philanthropist of his time, is doing splendid work in feeding the hungry music-lover.

I should like, just here, to enter a protest against the practice prevalent among our best soloists of giving their concerts in the afternoons. Does it not occur to MM. Pachmann, Paderewski, Backhaus, Mischa Elman, Hambourg, and others that there are thousands of music-lovers in London who are never free at afternoons, and cannot turn their little world upside down in order to snatch an afternoon even for something so compelling as their recitals? Continually London gives you these empty evenings. You do not want theatre or vaudeville; you want music. And it is not to be had at any price; though when it is to be had it is very well worth having.

No artist of any kind in music--singer, pianist, violinist, conductor--considers himself as established until he has appeared in London and received its award of merit; and whatever good things may be going in other continental cities we know that, with the least possible waste of time, those good things will be submitted to us for our sealing judgment. There is only one other city in the world which has so firm a grip on the music of the hour, and that is Buenos Ayres.

Let the superior persons, like Mr. Oscar Hammerstein, who says that London is not musical, because it sniffs at Schonberg, and doesn't get excited over the dead meat of Rossini, Auber, and Bellini, pay a visit any night to Queen's Hall during the Promenade Season. Where are the empty seats? In the five-shilling tier. Where is the hall packed to suffocation? In the shilling promenade. In the promenade there are seats for about one hundred, and room for about seven hundred. That means that six hundred Londoners stand, close-packed, with hardly room for a change of posture and in an atmosphere overcharged with heat and sound, for two hours and a half, listening, not to the inanities of Sullivan or Offenbach or Arditi, but to Weber, Palestrina, Debussy, Tchaikowsky, Wieniawski, Chopin, Mozart, Handel, and even the starch-stiff Bach.

Personally I prefer the sugar and spice of Italian Opera. I know it is an execrable taste, but as I am a most commonplace person I cannot help myself. I have loved it since childhood, when the dull pages of my Violin Tutor were lit by crystalline fragments of Cherubini and Donizetti, and when the house in which I lived was chattering day and night Italianate melody. One of my earliest recollections is of hearing, as a tiny thing in petticoats, the tedious noises of the professional musician, and the E A D G of the fiddle was the accompaniment to all my games. From noon until seven in the evening I played amid the squeak of the fiddle, the chant of the 'cello, the solemn throb of the double bass, and the querulous wail of flute and piccolo; and always the music was the music of Italy, for these elders worked in operatic orchestras. So I learned to love it, and especially do I still love the moderns--Leoncavallo, Wolf-Ferrari, Mascagni, Puccini--for it was in "La Bohème" that I heard both Caruso and grand opera for the first time; and whenever I now hear "Che gelida manina," even badly sung, I always want to sit down and have a good cry. It reminds me of a pale office-boy of fifteen, who had to hoard his pence for a fortnight and wait weary hours at the gallery door of Covent Garden to hear Caruso, Scotti, Melba, and Journet as the Bohemians. What nights! I remember very clearly that first visit. I had heard other singers, English singers, the best of whom are seldom better than the third-rate Italians, but Caruso.... What is he? He is not a singer. He is not a voice. He is a miracle. There will not be another Caruso for two or three hundred years; perhaps not then. We had been so accustomed to the spurious, manufactured voices of people like de Reszke and Tamagno and Maurel, that when the genuine article was placed before us we hardly recognized it. Here was something lovelier than anything that had yet been heard; yet we must needs stop to carp because it was not quite proper. All traditions were smashed, all laws violated, all rules ignored. Jean de Reszke would strain and strain, until his audience suffered with him, in order to produce an effect which this new singer of the South achieved with his hands in his pockets, as he strolled round the stage.

The Opera in London is really more of a pageant than a musical function. The front of the house frequently claims more attention than the stage. On Caruso and Melba nights it blazes. Tiers and tiers of boxes race round in a semicircle. If you are early, you see them as black gaping mouths. But very soon they are filled. The stalls begin to leap with light, for everybody who is not anybody, but would like to be somebody, drags out everything she possesses in the way of personal adornment, and sticks it on her person, so that all the world may wonder. At each box is a bunch of lights, and, with the arrival of the silks and jewellery, they are whipped to a thousand scintillations.

The blaze of dancing light becomes painful; the house, especially upstairs, is spitefully hot. Then the orchestra begin to tumble in; their gracefully gleaming lights are adjusted, and the monotonous A surges over the house--the fiddles whine it, the golden horns softly blare it, and the wood-wind plays with it.

But now there is a stir, a sudden outburst of clapping. Campanini is up. Slowly the lights dissolve into themselves. There is a subdued rustle as we settle ourselves. A few peremptory Sh-sh-sh! from the ardent galleryites.

Campanini taps. His baton rises ... and suddenly the band mumbles those few swift bars that send the curtain rushing up on the garret scene. Only a few bars ... yet so marvellous is Puccini's feeling for atmosphere that with them he has given us all the bleak squalor of his story. You feel a chill at your heart as you hear them, and before the curtain rises you know that it must rise on something miserable and outcast. The stage is in semi-darkness. The garret is low-pitched, with a sloping roof ending abruptly in a window looking over Paris. There is a stove, a table, two chairs, and a bed. Nothing more. Two people are on. One stands at the window, looking, with a light air of challenge, at Paris. Down stage, almost on the footlights, is an easel, at which an artist sits. The artist is Scotti, the baritone, as Marcello. The orchestra shudders with a few chords. The man at the window turns. He is a dumpy little man in black wearing a golden wig. What a figure it is! What a make-up! What a tousled-haired, down-at-heel, out-at-elbows Clerkenwell exile! The yellow wig, the white-out moustache, the broken collar.... But a few more brusque bars are tossed from Campanini's baton, and the funny little man throws off, cursorily, over his shoulder, a short passage explaining how cold he is. The house thrills. That short passage, throbbing with tears and laughter, has rushed, like a stream of molten gold, to the utmost reaches of the auditorium, and not an ear that has not jumped for joy of it. For he is Rudolfo, the poet; in private life, Enrico Caruso, Knight of the Order of San Giovanni, Member of the Victorian Order, Cavalier of the Order of Santa Maria, and many other things.

As the opera proceeds, so does the marvel grow. You think he can have nothing more to give than he has just given; the next moment he deceives you. Towards the end of the first Act, Melba enters. You hear her voice, fragile and firm as fluted china, before she enters. Then comes the wonderful love-duet--"Che gelida manina" for Caruso and "Mi chiamano Mimi" for Melba. Gold swathed in velvet is his voice. Like all true geniuses, he is prodigal of his powers; he flings his lyrical fury over the house. He gives all, yet somehow conveys that thrilling suggestion of great things in reserve. Again and again he recaptures his first fine careless rapture. His voice dances forth like a little girl on a sunlit road, wayward, captivating, never fatigued, leaping where others stumble, tripping many miles, with fresh laughter and bright quick blood. There never were such warmth and profusion and display. Not only is it a voice of incomparable magnificence: it has that intangible quality that smites you with its own mood: just the something that marks the difference between an artist and a genius. There are those who sniff at him. "No artist," they say; "look what he sings." They would like him better if he were not popular; if he concerned himself, not with Puccini and Leoncavallo, but with those pretentiously subtle triflers, Debussy and his followers. Some people can never accept beauty unless it be remote. But true beauty is never remote. The art which demands transcendentalism for its appreciation stamps itself at once as inferior. True art, like love, asks nothing, and gives everything. The simplest people can understand and enjoy Puccini and Caruso and Melba, because the simplest people are artists. And clearly, if beauty cannot speak to us in our own language, and still retain its dignity, it is not beauty at all.

Caruso speaks to us of the little things we know, but he speaks with a lyric ecstasy. Ecstasy is a horrible word; it sounds like something to do with algebra; but it is the one word for this voice. The passion of him has at times almost frightened me. I remember hearing him at the first performance of "Madame Butterfly," and he hurt us. He worked up the love-duet with Butterfly at the close of the first act in such fashion that our hands were wrung, we were perspiring, and I at least was near to fainting. Such fury, such volume of liquid sound could not go on, we felt. But it did. He carried a terrific crescendo passage as lightly as a school-girl singing a lullaby, and ended on a tremendous note which he sustained for sixty seconds. As the curtain fell we dropped back in our seats, limp, dishevelled, and pale. It was we who were exhausted. Caruso trotted on, bright, alert, smiling, and not the slightest trace of fatigue did he show.

It seems to have been a superb stroke of fortune for us that Caruso should have come along contemporaneously with Puccini. Puccini has never definitely written an opera for his friend; yet, to hear him sing them, you might think that every one had been specially made for him alone. Their temperaments are marvellously matched. Each is Italian and Southern to the bone. Whatever Caruso may be singing, whether it be Mozart or Gounod or Massenet or Weber, he is really singing Italy. Whatever setting Puccini may take for his operas, be it Japan, or Paris, or the American West, his music is never anything but Italian.

And I would not have it otherwise. It may offend some artistic consciences that Butterfly, the Japanese courtesan, should sob out her lament in music which is purely Italian in character and colour; but what a piece of melody it is!

Puccini's is a still small voice; very pleading, very conscious of itself and of the pathos of our little span of living; but the wistfulness of its appeal is almost heartbreaking. He can never, I suppose, stand among the great composers; dwarfed he must always be against Mozart or Weber, or even Verdi. But he has done what all wise men must do: he has discovered the one thing he can perform well, and he is performing it very well indeed. His genius is slim and miniature, but he handles it as an artist. There is no man living who can achieve such effects with so slender material. There is no man living who can so give you, in a few bars, the soul of the little street-girl; no man living who can so give you flavour of a mood, or make you smell so sharply the atmosphere of a public street, a garret, a ballroom, or a prairie. And he always succeeds because he is always sincere. A bigger man might put his tongue in his cheek and sit down to produce something like "La Bohème," and fail miserably, simply because he didn't mean it.

When Puccini has something to say, though it may be nothing profound or illuminating, he says it; and he can say the trite thing more freshly, with more delicacy, and in more haunting tones, than any other musician. His vocabulary is as marvellous as his facility in orchestration and in the development of a theme. He gets himself into tangles from which there seems no possible escape, only to extricate himself with the airiest of touches. Never does his fertility of melodic invention fail him. He is as prodigal in this respect as Caruso in his moments. Where others achieve a beautiful phrase, and rest on it, Puccini never idles; he has others and others, and he crowds them upon you until the ear is surfeited with sweetness, and you can but sit and marvel.

There it is. Sniff at it as you will, it is a great art that captures you against your reason, and when Puccini and Caruso join forces, they can shake the soul out of the most rabid of musical purists. What they do to commonplace people like myself is untellable. I have tried to hint at it in these few remarks, but really I have told you nothing ... nothing.

* * * * *

I am not over-fond of the Promenade Concerts. You have, of course, everything of the best--the finest music of the world, the finest English orchestra, and a neat little concert-hall; but somehow there is that about it that suggests Education. I have a feeling that Sir Henry is taking me by the hand, training me up in the way I should, musically, go. And I hate being trained. I don't want things explained to me. The programme looks rather like "Music without Tears" or "First Steps for the Little Ones." I know perfectly well what Wagner meant by the "Tannhäuser" overture, and what Beethoven wants to say to me in the Ninth Symphony. I don't want these things pointed out to me, and sandwiched between information as to when the composer was born, how long he lived, and how many hundred works he wrote. However, all that apart, the Promenades are an institution which we should cherish. For a shilling you can lean against the wall of the area, and smoke, and take your fill of the best in music. If there is anything that doesn't interest you, you can visit the bar until it is concluded. The audience on the Promenade is as interesting as the programme. All types are to be found here--the serious and hard-up student, the musically inclined working-man, probably a member of some musical society in his suburb, the young clerk, the middle-aged man, and a few people who KNOW.

The orchestra is well set, and its pendant crimson lamps and fernery make a solemn picture in the soft light. The vocalists and soloists are not, usually, of outstanding merit, but they sing and play agreeably, and, even if they attempt more than their powers justify them in doing, they never distress you. Sir Henry Wood's entrance on the opening night of any season is an impressive affair. As each known member of the orchestra comes in, he receives an ovation; but ovation is a poor descriptive for Sir Henry's reception. There is no doubt that he has done more for music in England than any other man, and his audiences know this; they regard him almost as a friend.

He is an artist in the matter of programmes. He builds them as a chef builds up an elaborate banquet, by the blending of many flavours and essences, each item a subtle, unmarked progression on its predecessor. He is very fond of his Russians, and his readings of Tchaikowsky seem to me the most beautiful work he does. I do not love Tchaikowsky, but he draws me by, I suppose, the attraction of repulsion. The muse who guides the dreamings of the Russian artist is a sombre and heavy-lidded lady, but most sombre, I think, when she moves in the brain of the musician. Then she wears the glooms and sables of the hypochondriac. She does not "nerve us with incessant affirmations." Rather, she enervates us with incessant dubitations. It is more than a relief to leave the crowded Promenade, after a Tchaikowsky symphony, to stroll in the dusky glitter of Langham Place, and return to listen the clear, cool tones of Mozart, as sparkling and as gracious as a May morning! Next to Tchaikowsky, Sir Henry gives us much of Wagner and Beethoven and Mendelssohn. I can never understand why Mendelssohn is played nowadays. His music always seems to me to be so provincial and gentlemanly and underbred as to remind one of a county ball. I am sure he always composed in a frock-coat, silk hat, and lavender gloves. When he is being played, many of us have to rush away and saunter in the foyer.

Usually the programme contains some examples of modern French music (a delicate horror by Ravel, perhaps) and of the early Italians. You will get something sweet and suave and restful by Palestrina or Handel, and conclude, perhaps, with a tempest of Berlioz.

During the season of the Promenades, there are also excellent concerts going on in the lost districts of London. There is, to begin with, the Grand Opera season at the Old Vic. in Waterloo Road, where you can get a box for one-and-sixpence, and a seat in the gallery for twopence. The orchestra is good, and the singers are satisfactory. The operas include "Daughter of the Regiment," and run through Verdi and some of Wagner to Mascagni and Charpentier. The audience is mostly drawn from the surrounding streets, the New Cut and Lower Marsh. It wears its working clothes, and it smokes cut Cavendish; but there is not a whisper from the first bar of the overture to the curtain. The chorus is drawn from the local clubs, and a very live and intelligent chorus it is. Then there are the Saturday evening concerts at the People's Palace in Whitechapel, at the Surrey Masonic Hall, in Camberwell, at Cambridge House, and at Vincent Square. In each case the programme is distinctly classical. It is only popular in the sense that the prices are small and the performers' services are honorary. Many a time have I attended one of these concerts, because I knew I should hear there some old, but obscure, classic that I should never be likely to hear at any of the West End concert-halls.

These West End halls are unhappily situated. The dismal Bond Street holds one, another stands cheek by jowl with Marlborough Police Court, and the other two are stuck deep in the melancholic greyness of Wigmore Street. All are absurdly inaccessible. However, when it is a case of Paderewski or Hambourg or Backhaus or Ysayt, people will make pilgrimages to the end of the earth ... or to Wigmore Street. It was at the Bechstein, on a stifling June evening, that I first heard that mischievous angel, Vladimir de Pachmann.

We had dined solidly, with old English ale, at "The Cock," in Fleet Street. Perhaps tomato soup, mutton cutlets, quarts of bitter, apple and blackberry tart and cream, macaroni cheese, coffee, and kümmel are hardly in the right key for an evening with Chopin. But I am not one of those who take their pleasures sadly. If I am to appreciate delicate art, I must be physically well prepared. It may be picturesque to sit through a Bayreuth Festival on three dates and a nut, but monkey-tricks of that kind are really a slight on one's host. However, I felt very fat, physically, and very Maeterlinckian, spiritually, as we clambered into a cab and swung up the great bleak space of Kingsway.

At the entrance to the Steinway we ran against a bunch of critics, and adjourned to the little place at the opposite corner, so that one of the critics might learn from us what he ought to say about the concert. We had just time to slip into our seats, and then Pachmann, sleek and bullet-headed, minced on to the platform. I said that I felt fat, physically, and Maeterlinckian or Burne-Jonesy, or anything else that suggests the twilight mood, spiritually. But the moment Pachmann came on he drove the mood clean out of us. Obviously, he wasn't feeling Maeterlinckian or Chopinesque. He was feeling very full of Pachmann, one could see. Nothing die-away or poetic about him. He was fat physically, and he looked fat spiritually. One conceived him much more readily nodding over the fire with the old port, than playing Chopin in a bleak concert-hall, laden with solemn purples and drabs, stark and ungarnished save for a few cold flowers and ferns.

However, there he was; and after he had played games and cracked jokes, of which nobody knew the secrets but himself, with the piano-stool, his hair, and his handkerchief, he set to work. He flourished a few scales; looked up; giggled; said something to the front row; looked off and nodded; rubbed his fingers; gently patted his ashen cheek; then stretched both hands to the keys.

He played first a group of Preludes. What is there to say about him? Nothing. Surely never, since Chopin went from us, has Chopin been so played. The memory of my Fleet Street dinner vanished. The hall vanished. All surroundings vanished. Vladimir, the antic, took us by the hand and led us forth into a new country: a country like nothing that we have seen or dreamed of, and therefore a country of which not the vaguest image can be created. It was a country, or, perhaps, a street of pale shadows ... and that is all I know. Its name is Pachmann-land.

Before he was through the first short prelude, he had us in his snare. One by one the details of the room faded, and nothing was left but a cloud of lilac in which were Pachmann and the sleek, gleaming piano. As he played, change succeeded change. The piano was labelled Chappell, but it might just as well have been labelled Bill Bailey. Under Pachmann, the wooden structure took life, as it were, and became a living thing, breathing, murmuring, clamouring, shrieking. Soon there was neither Chappell, nor Pachmann, nor Chopin; only a black creature--Piano. One shivered, and felt curiously afraid.

Then, suddenly, there was a crash of chords--and silence. That crash had shattered everything, and, looking up, we saw nothing but the grinning Pachmann. One half-remembered that he had been grinning and gesturing and grimacing with ape-like imbecility all the time, yet, somehow, one had not noticed it. He bobbed up and down, and grinned, and applauded himself. But there was something uncanny, mysterious. We looked at one another uneasily, afraid to exchange glances. Nobody spoke. Nobody wanted to speak. A few smiled shy, secret smiles, half-afraid of themselves. For some moments nobody even applauded. Something had been with us. Something strange and sad and exquisitely fragile had gone from us.

Pachmann looked at us, noted our dumb wonder, and--giggled like an idiot.

[The end]
Thomas Burke's essay: Musical Night (The Opera, The Promenades)

________________________________________________



GO TO TOP OF SCREEN