Ornstein
Ornstein is a mirror held up to the world of the modern city. The first of his real compositions are like fragments of some cosmopolis of caves and towers of steel, of furious motion and shafts of nitrogen glare become music. They are like sensitive surfaces that have been laid in the midst of the New Yorks; and record not only the clangors, but all the violent forms of the city, the beat of the frenetic activity, the intersecting planes of light, the ma.s.ses of the masonry with the tiny, dwarf-like creatures running in and out, the electric signs staining the inky nightclouds. They give again the alarum of dawn breaking upon the crowded, swarming cells; seven o"clock steam whistles on a winter morn; pitiless light filtering over hurrying black droves of humanity; thousands of shivering workers blackening Fourteenth Street. They picture the very Niebelheim, the hordes of slaves herded by giants of their own creation, the commands and cries of power in the bells, whistles, signals. The grinding and shrieking of loaded trains in the tubes, cranes laboring in the port, rotary engines drilling, turbines churning are woven through them. Blankets of fog descend upon the river; menacing shapes loom through it; rays of red light seek to cut the mist.
Flowers that are gray and black blossom on the ledges of tenement windows giving on bare walls. And human souls and songs that are gray and black like them bloom in the blind air, open their velvet petals, their l.u.s.trous, soft corollas, from crannies and windows into this metal, this dun, this unceasing roar.
For Ornstein is youth. He is the one striving to adjust himself to all this thunder and welter and glare. He is the spring as it comes up through the pavements, the aching green sap. In part, no doubt, he is the resurrection of the most entombed of spirits, that of the outlaw European Jew. He is the breaking down of the walls with which the Jew had blotted out the hateful world. He is Lazarus emerging in his grave clothes into the new world; the Jewish spirit come up into the day from out the bas.e.m.e.nt and cellar rooms of the synagogue where it had been seated for a thousand years drugging itself with rabbinical lore, refining almost maniacally upon the intention of some obscure phrase or parable, negating the lure of the world and of experience with a ma.s.s of rites and observances and ceremonials, losing itself in the gray desert stretches of theory, or wasting itself in the impossible dream of Zion restored in modern Palestine and Solomon"s temple rebuilt in a provincial capital of the Turkish Empire. And Ornstein"s music is the music of a birth that is the tearing away of grave clothes grown to the body, the clawing away, stone by stone, of the wall erected against the call of experience which was sure to be death-dealing. The old prohibitions are still active in it in the terror with which life is viewed, in the menace and cruelty of things, the sharpness of edges encountered, the weight of the ma.s.ses that threaten to fall and overwhelm, the fury and blackness and horror of nature once again regarded. Again and again there pa.s.ses through it the haggard, shrouded figure of the Russian Jew. The "Poems of 1917" are full of the wailings and rockings of little old Ghetto mothers. Again and again Ornstein speaks in accents that resemble nothing quite so much as the savage and woeful language of the Old Testament.
But the music of Ornstein is much besides. It is a thing germane to all beings born into the age of steel. It is the expression of all the men who have tried to embrace and love the towering piles, the strange, black, desolate pathways that are the world to-day. The figure that one discerns in the compositions beginning with the "Dwarf Suite," Opus 16, is one that we all have known intimately a s.p.a.ce. These pieces are not youth seen through the golden haze of retrospection. They are the expression of groping, fumbling youth as it feels and as it feels, itself to be. They are music young in all its excess, its violence, its sharp griefs and sharper joys, its unreflecting, trembling strength. The spring comes up hot and cruel in them. There is all the loneliness of youth in this music, all the mysterious dreams of a world scarce understood, all the hesitancies and blind gropings of powers untried.
Always, one senses the pavements stretching between steel buildings, the black, hurrying tides of human beings; and through them all, the oppressed figure of one searching out the meaning of all this convulsive activity into which he has been born. It is such solitude that speaks in the first "Impression of Notre-Dame" with its gray mounting ma.s.ses, its cloisteral reverberation of bells, its savage calls of the city to one standing alone with the monument of a dead age. Violent, uncontrolled pa.s.sions cry out in the "Three Moods," with their youthful surrender to the moment. The energy of adolescence, unleashed, rejoicing in pure muscular activity, disports itself in the "Shadow Dances," and in the "Wild Man"s Dance," with its sheer, naked, beating rhythm. The bitterness of adolescence mocks in the "Three Burlesques," in the "Dance of the Gnomes," with its parodying of clumsy movements. What revolt in the first "Piano Sonata"! And other emotions, timid and uncertain of themselves, uneasy with the swelling sap of springtide, speak their poetry and their pain, tell their tales and are silent, make us remember what once we felt.
The city, the birth into the new world, youth, exist in the music of Ornstein with all the sharpness of shock because of an imagination of a wonderful forcefulness. There is no indirectness in Ornstein, no vagueness. His tension is always of the fullest, the stiffest. What he feels, what he hears, he sets down, irrespective of all the canons and rules and procedures. Harmony with him is something different than it is with any other composer. Piano colors of a violence and garishness are hurled against each other. The lowest and highest registers of the instrument clash in "Improvisata." Rhythms battle, convulsively, almost.
In portions of the "Sinfonietta," five rhythms are to be found warring against each other. Melodic curves, lines, sing ecstatically over turbulent, mottled counterpoint in the piano and violin sonatas. The violin sonata is something of an attempt to exhaust all the possibilities of color-contrast contained in the little brown box. In the first "Impression de Notre-Dame," the piano is metallic with the booming bells. In the second, it is stony, heavy with the congested, peering, menacing forms of gargoyles. In the accompaniment to the song "Waldseligkeit," it seems to give the musical equivalent for the substance of wood. No doubt, to one who, like Ornstein, regarded music only as a means of communication, as speech of man to man, and occupied himself only with the communication of his sensations and experience in briefest, directest, simplest form, there must have come moments of the most terrible self-doubt, when all the anathemas of the fathers of the musical church thundered loud in his ears, and other men"s forms and proportions seemed to make his shrivel. It was doubtless thankfulness to William Blake, that other "mad" inventor of wild images and designs, that other "rager in the wilds," for fortification and sustenance, that made him preface his violin sonata with the Argument of "The Marriage of Heaven and h.e.l.l," and defend himself with the verses:
"Once meek, and in a perilous path, The just man kept his course along The vale of death.
Roses are planted where thorns grew, And on the barren heath Sing the honey bees....
"Till the villain left the paths of ease, To walk in perilous paths, and drive The just man into barren climes.
"Now the sneaking serpent walks In mild humility, And the just man rages in the wilds Where lions roam."
And certainly, for us, whatever the pundits claim, the wilds of Leo Ornstein are not so raging and lion-infested. For while one speculates whether these pieces are music or not, one discovers that one has entered through them into the life of another being, and through him into the lives of a whole upgrowing generation.
At present, however, some of those qualities that were so clearly visible in Leo Ornstein during the first years in which he disclosed himself are somewhat obscured. Something not entirely rea.s.suring has happened to the man. A great deal of the music that he has been composing of late wants the bite his earlier work had. The colors are not so piping hot. The outlines are less bold and jagged and clear-cut.
Some of the convulsive intensity, the fury, has pa.s.sed out of the rhythmic element. The melodies are less acidulous, the moods less unbridled. No doubt, something happier has entered into his music, something more voluptuous and smooth. The "cello chants pa.s.sionately and dreamily in the two sonatas Ornstein has written of late for it. The racial element is softened, become gentler and duskier and more romantic. The Jew in it no longer wears his gaberdine. If he wears a prayer-shawl at all, it is one made of silk. The Jeremiah of the desert has given way to the young, amorous, dream-filled poet, a poet of the sort that arose among the Jews in Spain during the years of the Moorish ascendency. Yet, a certain intensity, a certain originality, a certain vein of genius, has undergone eclipse in the change. Something a little brilliant, a little facile, a little undistinguished, has introduced itself, even into the best of the newest pieces. The texture is thinner, the tension slacker. Ornstein does not seem to be putting himself into them with the same directness and completeness with which he put himself into his earlier work. Moreover, occasionally there come from his pen works into which he is not putting himself at all. A choral society of New York a year or two ago produced two small _a capella_ choruses of his that might have been the work of some obscure pupil of Tchaikowsky"s. The piano sonatina of the Funeral March, although by no means as insignificant, is nevertheless uncharacteristic in the resemblances it bears the music of Ravel. One thing the earlier compositions are not, and that is, derivative. Ornstein, they make plain, had benefited by the achievements of Debussy and Moussorgsky and Scriabine. But they made plain as well that he had developed a style of his own, a style that was, for all its crudeness and harshness, personal. In becoming again a disciple he reverts to something that he seemed to have left behind him when he wrote his clangorous "Dwarf Suite."
What this new period of Ornstein"s composition represents it is not easy to say. Probably, it is a period of transition, a time of the marshaling of forces to a new and fiercer onslaught. Such a time of gestation might well be necessary to Ornstein"s genius. It is possible that he has had to give up something in order to gain something else, to try for less in order to establish himself upon a footing firmer than that upon which he stood. His genius during his first years of creation was lyrical purely. It was a thing that expressed itself in picturing moods, in making brief flights, in establishing _moments musicaux._ He is at his best in his piano preludes, in his small forms. The works composed during this period in the larger forms, the violin sonata excepted, are scarcely achieved. The outer movements of the Grand Sonata for pianoforte, for instance, are far inferior to the central ones. Whatever the merit of some of the individual movements of "The Masqueraders,"
Opus 36, and the "Poems of 1917," and at times it is not small, the works as a whole lack form. They have none of the unity and variety and solidity of the "Papillons" and the "Carnaval" of Schumann or the "Valses n.o.bles et sentimentales" of Ravel, for instance, works to which they are in certain other respects comparable. As he grew a little older, Ornstein"s nature probably began to demand other forms beside these smaller, more episodic ones. It probably began to strive for greater scope, duration, development, complexity. And so, in order to gain greater intellectual control over his outflow, to learn to build piles of a bulk that require an entirely different workmanship and supervision than do preludes and impressions, Ornstein doubtlessly has been withholding himself, diminishing the intensity of his fire. In order to learn to organize his material, he has doubtlessly unconsciously lessened its density and vibrancy for the time being.
And, too, it may be the result of a change from a pain-economy to a pleasure-economy. The adolescent has grown into the young man. The adjustment may have been made. The poet is no longer forced to mint his miseries and pains alone into art; he is learning to be glad. He may again be seeking to find himself in a world grown different.
At the same time, there is a distinct possibility that the present period of Ornstein"s composition is not a time of preparation for a new flight. There is a distinct possibility that it represents an unwholesome slackening. After all, may it not be that he has flinched?
Stronger men than he have succ.u.mbed to a hostile world. And Ornstein has found the world very hostile. He has found America absolutely unprepared for his art, possessed with no technique to cope with it. He has very largely been operating in a void. It is not so much that he has been tried and found wanting. He has not even been heard. Because the musical world has been unable to follow him, it has dismissed him entirely from its consciousness. Scarcely a critic has been able to express what it is about his music that he likes or dislikes. They have either ridiculed him or written cordially about him without saying anything. There is nothing more demoralizing for the artist. At present they are even cla.s.sing him with Prokofief. The virtuosi have shown a like timidity.
Scarcely a one has dared perform his music. Many have refrained out of policy, unwilling to forfeit any applause. Others have no doubt quite sincerely refused to perform any music that sounded cacophonous to them.
For the army of musicians is almost entirely composed of rearguard. Not a single one of the orchestral conductors in New York has dared consider performing his "Sinfonietta," to say nothing of the early and comparatively accessible "Marche funebre" and "A la chinoise." Of the Philharmonic Society, of course, one expects nothing. But one might suppose that the various organizations allegedly "friendly" to music, eager for the cause of the "new" and the "modern," would see to it that the musician whom such an authority as Ernest Bloch has declared to be the single composer in America who displays positive signs of genius, was given his opportunity. The contrary has been the case. D"Indy"s foolish war symphony, the works of Henry Hadley, of Rachmaninoff, of David Stanley Smith, even of Dvorsky, that person who exists as little in the field of composition as he does in Biarritz, have received and do receive the attention of our powerful ones. It would be small wonder, then, if an artist like Ornstein, who, like every real artist, requires the contact of other minds and cannot go on producing, hopeless of attaining performance and exhibition, had finally flinched and wearied of his efforts, and suddenly found himself writing such music as the intelligences of his fellow-craftsmen can reasonably be expected to comprehend.
There are other reasons that might lead one to presume that these recent works represent a slump. For Ornstein has been devoting too much of his energy to concertizing. He has been traveling madly over the United States and Canada for the last few years, living in Pullman sleepers and playing to audiences of all sorts. During the first years that he was in America after the outbreak of war in Europe, he at least played the music that he loved. But no one was ready for programs beginning with Korngold and Cyril Scott and ending with Ravel and Scriabine and Ornstein himself. So little by little Ornstein began adulterating his programs, adding a popular piece here, another there. Recently, he has been playing music into which he cannot put his heart at all, Liszt and Rubinstein as well as Beethoven and Schumann. He has been performing it none too brilliantly. Such an existence cannot but dull the man"s edge.
No one can play the Twelfth Hungarian Rhapsody or the transcription of the Mendelssohn Wedding March or the Rigoletto Fantasy continually without being punished. No one who does not love them can play the Sonata Appa.s.sionata or the _Etudes symphoniques_ or the waltzes of Chopin long without becoming dulled and spoiled. So with composition become an interval between two trains, and expression an attempt to please audiences and to establish oneself with the public as a popular pianist, it is not the most preposterous of thoughts that Leo Ornstein has lost something he once possessed in beautiful and superabundant form.
Still, it is fairly incredible. It is impossible that great and permanent harm should have been done him already. He was too vital and sane a being to be so easily corrupted. For those who knew him in the first years of his return from Paris, he was nothing if not the genius.
If he was less accomplished, less resourceful and magistral an artist than Strawinsky, for instance, whom he resembles in a certain general way, he was at least a more human, a more pa.s.sionate being. It is this great vitality, this rich temperament, that makes one sure that we are not going to have in Leo Ornstein another Richard Strauss, another Strauss who has never had the many fertile years vouchsafed the other.
It makes us sure that he will finally come to terms with his managers and audiences, and that the harm already done him by his way of life will grow no greater. It convinces us that his present mood is but the result of a necessary process of transition from one basis to another; that the man is really summoning himself for the works that will express him in his manhood. And we are positive that there will shortly come from him weighty musical forms with colors as burning and deep as those of his first pieces, and of like intensity and boldness; and that Leo Ornstein is sure of reaching the high heaven of art for which he seemed and still seems bound.
Bloch
Once before, East and West have met and merged. On the plains where the soldiers of Darius and Alexander slaughtered one another, and where the Macedonian phalanxes recoiled before the castellated elephants of Porus, a marriage was consummated. Hovering over the heads of the opposing armies, the angel of Europe and the angel of Asia embraced, and sent their lifebloods coursing through each other. Pa.s.sage was made to India.
The two continents slowly faced about. Two reservoirs that had been acc.u.mulating for eons the precious distillations of two great centers of the human race began mingling their essences. In whatever the East did, there was evident the hand of the West. In whatever the West thought there was visible the prismatic intelligence of the East. The G.o.ds of Greece showed their smooth foreheads on the banks of the Ganges.
Oriental systems refracted the blonde Mediterranean light into an hundred subtle tints. But the empire of Alexander crumbled, Parthians annihilated the legions of Cra.s.sus. Persians and Seljuks and Ottomans barred Europe from the East. Steady communication ceased. Asia withdrew under her cloudy mysterious curtains. Legendary fumes, Cathay, Zipango, the Indias of the Great Ocean, arose. Once again, the two basins were cut off. Once again, each began secreting a substance radically different from the other"s, a substance growing more individual with each elapsing century. For almost two thousand years, East and West developed away one from the other.
And now, a second time, in our own hour, the two have drawn close and confronted each other. Once again, a fusion has taken place. We are to-day in the midst of a movement likely to surpa.s.s the period of h.e.l.lenization in duration and extent. This time, perhaps, no dramatic march of Macedonians to the banks of the Indus has served to make the connection. Nevertheless, in the image of Amy Lowell, guns have again shown themselves keys. For a couple of centuries, great gates have been swinging throughout the East at the behest of frigates and armed merchantmen. And slowly, once again, Asia has been seeping into Europe.
Warm spicy gusts have been drifting over the West, steadily permeating the air. At first, there appeared to be nothing serious in the infiltration. The eighteenth century was apparently coquetting only with Eastern motifs. If Chinese palaces put in their appearance at Drottningholm and Pillnitz, in all portions of the continent; if Chippendale began giving curious delicate twists to his furniture, it seemed nothing more than a matter of caprice. The zest for Persian letters, Oriental nouvelles, Turkish marches, arose apparently only from the desire for masquerade. Gretry, Mozart, Wieland, scarcely took their seraglios, pashas, bulbuls earnestly. But, gradually, with the arrival of the nineteenth century, what had hitherto seemed play only, began to a.s.sume a different shape. The East was indeed dawning upon the West again. The mists were being burned away. Through Sir William Jones and Friedrich Schlegel, the wisdom of the dangerous slippery Indies was opened to Europe. Goethe, as ever the outrider, revealed the new orientation in his "West-Oestlicher Divan" and his "Chinesich-Deutsche Jahres-und-Tages-Zeiten." In 1829, Victor Hugo published "Les Orientales"; in 1859, Fitzgerald his "Omar." If Weber little more than toyed with Chinese and Turkish musical color in "Turandot" and in "Oberon," Felicien David in his songs and in his "Le Desert" attempted seriously to infiltrate into European music the musical feeling of the Levant. In the corner of Schopenhauer"s apartment there sat an effigy of the Buddha; volumes of the Upanishads lay on his table. In 1863 for the first time, a Paris shop offered for sale a few j.a.panese prints. Manet, Whistler, Monet, the brothers De Goncourt came and bought. But though the craze for painting Princesses du Pays de la Porcelaine ended rapidly, European painting was revolutionized. Surfaces once more came into being. Color was born again under the brushes of the impressionists and the post-impressionists. The sense of touch was freed. In all the arts the art of j.a.pan became powerful. De Maupa.s.sant wrote a prose that is full of the technique of the j.a.panese prints; that works chiefly through means of sharp little lines and dainty spotting. All five senses were being born again. People listened with new keenness to the sounds of instruments. The Russian sons of Berlioz with their new orchestral chemistry arrived. The orchestral machine expanded and grew subtle.
Huysmans dreamt of symphonies of liqueurs, concertos of perfumery.
And the new century, when it came, showed that it was no deliberately a.s.sumed thing, this fusion of Oriental and Occidental modes of feeling, showed that it was a thing arising deep in the being. Something that had long lain inert had been reborn at the contact in Western men. A part of personality that had lain dead had of a sudden been suffused with blood and warmth; light played over a hemisphere of the mind long dark. The very hand that drew, the very mouth that matched words, the very body that beat and curved and swayed in movement, were Western and Eastern at the same time. It was no longer the Greek conception of form that prevailed on the banks of the Seine, or wherever art was produced. Art was become again, what the Orientals had always known it to be, significant form. It was as though Persia had been born again in Henri Matisse, for instance. A sense of design and color the like of which had hitherto been manifest only in the vases and bloomy carpets of Teheran dictated his exquisite patterns. Hokusai and Outamaro got in Vincent Van Gogh a brother. The sultry atmosphere and animal richness of Hindoo art reappeared in Gauguin"s wood-cuts. One has but to go to any really modern art, whether produced in Paris or in Munich or in New York, to see again the subtle browns and silvers and vermilions, the delicate sensuous touch, the infinitely various patterns, the forms that carry with them the earth from Arabia to j.a.pan.
As in the plastic arts, so in poetry. The imagists, Ezra Pound in particular, were Chinese long before they discovered Cathay in the works of Ernest Fennellosa. And in music, certainly, the East is on us; has been on us since the Russian five began their careers and expressed their own half-European, half-Mongol, natures. The stream has commenced setting since the Arabian Nights, the Persian odalisques, the Tartar tribesmen became music. And the Chinese sensibility of Scriabine, the Oriental chromatics of the later Rimsky-Korsakoff, the sinuous scales and voluptuous colors and silken textures of Debussy, the shrill fantastic j.a.panese idiom of Strawinsky, have shown us the fusion was near.
But in the music of no composer is it as plainly evident as it is in that of Ernest Bloch. In a work like this composer"s suite for viola and piano, one has a sense of a completeness of fusion such as no other gives. Here, the West has advanced furthest east, the East furthest west. Two things are balanced in the work, two things developed through a score of centuries by two uncommunicating regions. The organizing power of Europe is married to the sensuousness of Asia. The virile formative power of the heirs of Bach is here. An extended form is solid as mountains, projects volumes through time. One four-square movement is set atop another. There is no weakening, no slackening, no drop. One can put one"s hand around these brown-gold blocks. And at the same time, this organizing power makes to live a dusky sensuality, a velvety richness of texture, a sultriness and wetness that sets us amid the bronzed glowing wood-carvings of Africans, the dark sunsets of Ceylon, the paG.o.das in which the Chinaman sits and sings of his felicity, his family, his garden. The lyric blue of Chinese art, the tropical forests with their horrid heat and dense growths and cruel animal life, the Polynesian seas of azure tulle, the spice-laden breezes, chant here. The monotony, the melancholy, the bitterness of the East, things that had hitherto sounded only from the darkly shining zither of the Arabs, or from the deathly gongs and tam-tams of the Mongolians, speak through Western instruments. It is as though something had been brought out from a steaming Burmese swamp and exposed to the terrible beat of a New York thoroughfare, and that out of that transplantation a matter utterly new and sad and strange, favoring both father and mother, and yet of a character distinctly individual, had been created.
For no composer was better fitted by nature to receive the stimulus of the onrushing East. As a Jew, Bloch carried within himself a fragment of the Orient; was in himself an outpost of the mother of continents. And he is one of the few Jewish composers really, fundamentally self-expressive. He is one of the few that have fully accepted themselves, fully accepted the fate that made them Jewish and stigmatized them. After all, it was not the fact that they were "homeless" as Wagner pretended, that prevented the company of Meyerbeers and Mendelssohns from creating. It was rather more the fact that, inwardly, they refused to accept themselves for what they were. The weakness of their art is to be understood only as the result of the spiritual warfare that threatens to divide every Jew against himself.
There was operative in them, whether they were aware of it or no, a secret desire to escape their stigmata. They were deliberately deaf to the promptings of the beings that were so firmly planted in the racial soil. They were fugitive from the national consciousness. The bourn of impulse was half stopped. It was not that they did not write "Jewish"
music, utilize solely racial scales and melodies. The artist of Jewish extraction need not do so to be saved. The whole world is open before him. He can express his day as he will. One thing, however, is necessary. He must not seek to inhibit any portion of his impulse. He must not attempt to deny his modes of apprehension and realization because they are racially colored. He must possess spiritual harmony.
The whole man must go into his expression. And it was just the "whole man" who did not go into the work of the composers who have hitherto represented "Judaism in Music." An inhibited, harried impulse is manifest in their art.
For, like Meyerbeer, convinced of the worthlessness of their feelings, they manufactured spectacles for the operatic stage, and pandered to a taste which they least of all respected. Or, like Mendelssohn, they tried to adapt themselves to the alien atmosphere of Teutonic romance, and produced a musical jargon that resembles nothing in the world so much as Yiddish. Or, with Rubinstein, they gloved themselves in a pretty salon style in order to conceal all vestiges of the flesh, or tried, with Gustav Mahler, to intone "Ave Maria." Some, no doubt, would have preferred to have been true to themselves. Goldmark (the uncle) is an example. But his desire remained intention, largely. For his method was a trifle childish. He conceived it as a lying on couches amid cushions, sniffing Orient perfumes in scent-bottles. He did not realize that the couch was the comfortable German _canape,_ the cushions the romantic style of Weber and the early Wagner, and that through the
"Sabaean odors from the spicy sh.o.r.e Of Araby the blest"
there drifted the doubtlessly very appetizing smell of Viennese cookery.
But there is music of Ernest Bloch that is a large, a poignant, an authentic expression of what is racial in the Jew. There is music of his that is authentic by virtue of qualities more fundamentally racial than the synagogical modes on which it bases itself, the Semitic pomp and color that inform it. There are moments when one hears in this music the harsh and haughty accents of the Hebrew tongue, sees the abrupt gestures of the Hebrew soul, feels the t.i.tanic burst of energy that created the race and carried it intact across lands and times, out of the eternal Egypt, through the eternal Red Sea. There are moments when this music makes one feel as though an element that had remained unchanged throughout three thousand years, an element that is in every Jew and by which every Jew must know himself and his descent, were caught up in it and fixed there. Bloch has composed settings for the Psalms that are the very impulse of the Davidic hymns incarnate in another medium; make it seem as though the genius that had once flowered at the court of the king had attained miraculous second blooming. The setting of the 114th Psalm is the very voice of the rejoicing over the pa.s.sage of the Red Sea, the very l.u.s.ty blowing on ox horns, the very hieratic dance. The voice of Jehovah, has it spoken to those who throughout the ages have called for it much differently than it speaks at the close of Bloch"s 22nd Psalm?
And it is something like the voice of Job that speaks in the desolation of the third of the "Poemes juives." Once again, the Ecclesiast utters his disillusion, his cruel disappointment, his sense of the utter vanity of existence in the soliloquy of the "cello in the rhapsody "Schelomo."
Once again, the tent of the tabernacle that Jehovah ordered Moses to erect in the wilderness, and hang with curtains and with veils, lifts itself in the introduction to the symphony "Israel." The great kingly limbs and beard and bosom of Abraham are, once again, in the first movement of the work; the dark, grave, soft-eyed women of the Old Testament, Rebecca, Rachel, Ruth, re-appear in the second, with its flowing voices.
Racial traits abound in this body of work. These ponderous forms, these sudden movements, these imperious, barbaric, ritual trumpet blasts, bring to mind all one knows of Semitic art, recall the crowned winged bulls of the a.s.syrians as well as Flaubert"s Carthage, with its pyramided temples and cisterns and neighing horses in the acropolis.
Bloch"s themes oftentimes have the subtle, far-flung, monotonous line of the synagogic chants. Many of his melodic bits, although pure inventions, are indubitably hereditary. The mode of a race is, after all, but the intensified inflection of its speech. And Bloch"s melodic line, with its strange intervals, its occasional quarter notes, approximates curiously to the inflections of the Hebrew tongue. Like so much of the Gregorian chant, which it oftentimes recalls, one can conceive this music as part of the Temple service in Jerusalem. And like the melodic line, so, too, the phrases a.s.signed to the trumpets in the setting of the three Psalms and in the symphony "Israel." They, also, might once have resounded through the courts of Herod"s temple. The unusual accents, the unusual intervals, give the instruments a timbre at once imperious, barbaric, ritual. And how different from the theatric Orientalism of so many of the Russians are the crude dissonances of Bloch, the terrible consecutive fourths and fifths, the impetuous rhythms, savage and frenetic in their emphasis. This music is shrill and tawny and bitter with the desert. Its flavor is indeed new to European music. Certainly, in the province of the string quartet, nothing quite like the salty and acrid, the fruity, drugging savor of Bloch"s work, has ever before appeared.
And it was not until the Jewish note appeared in his work that Bloch spoke his proper language. The works that precede the "Trois Poemes juives," the first of his compositions in which the racial gesture is consciously made, do not really represent the man as he is. No doubt, the brilliant and ironic scherzo of the C-sharp minor Symphony, whose verve and pa.s.sion and vigor make the composer of "L"Apprenti sorcier"
seem apprentice indeed, is already characteristic of the composer of the string quartet and the suite for viola and piano. But much of the symphony is derivative. One glimpses the influence of Liszt and Tchaikowsky and Strauss in it. So too with the opera "Macbeth," written a few years after the composition of the symphony, when the composer was twenty-four. Despite the effectiveness of the setting it gives the melodrama cleverly abstracted from Shakespeare"s tragedy by Edmond Flegg, the score bears a still undecided signature. One feels that the composer has recently encountered the personalities of Moussorgsky and Debussy. No doubt, one begins to sense the proper personality of Bloch in the delicate coloring of the two little orchestral sketches "Hiver-Printemps," in the mournful English horn against the harp in "Hiver," in the chirruping hurdy-gurdy commencement of "Printemps."
Unfortunately, the cantilena in the second number still points backward.
But with the "Trois Poemes juives," the original Bloch is at hand. These compositions were conceived at first as studies for "Jezabel," the opera Bloch intended composing directly after he had completed the scoring of "Macbeth" in 1904. To-day, "Jezabel" still exists only in the libretto of Flegg and in the series of sketches deposited in the composer"s portfolio. The moment in which Bloch is to find it possible for him to realize the work has not yet arrived. Planned at first to follow directly upon "Macbeth," "Jezabel" promises fairly to become the goal of his first great creative period. But out of the conception of the opera itself, out of the desire of creating a work around this Old Testamentary figure, out of the train of emotion excited by the project, there have already flowed results of a first magnitude for Bloch and for modern music. For in the process of searching out a style befitting this biblical drama, and in the effort to master the idiom necessary to it, Bloch executed the compositions that have placed him so eminently in the company of the few modern masters. The three Psalms, "Schelomo,"
"Israel," portions of the quartet, have but trodden further in the direction marked out by the "Trois Poemes juives." "Jezabel" has turned out to be one of those dreams that lead men on to the knowledge of themselves.
And yet, the "Jewish composer" that the man is so often said to be, he most surely is not. He is too much the man of his time, too much the universal genius, to be thus placed in a single category. His art succeeds to that of Moussorgsky and Debussy quite as much as does that of Strawinsky and Ravel; he rests quite as heavily on the great European traditions of music as he does on his own hereditary strain.
Indeed, he is of the modern masters one of those the most conscious of the tradition of his art. He falls heir to Bach and to Haydn and to Beethoven quite as much as any living musician. Quite as much as that of any other his music is an image of the time. In the quartet, his magistral work, the Hebraic element is only one of several. The trio of the scherzo is like a section of some Polynesian forest, with its tropic warmth, its monstrous growths, its swampy earth, its chattering monkeys and birds of paradise. There is the beat of the age of steel in the finale. And the delicate Pastorale is redolent of the gentle fields of Europe, smells of the hay, gives again the nun-like close of day in temperate skies. It is only that as a Jew it was necessary for Ernest Bloch to say yea to his own heredity before his genius could appear. And to what a degree it has appeared, one can gauge from the intensity with which his age mirrors itself in the music he has already composed. His music is the modern man in his lately gotten sense of the tininess of the human elements in the race, the enormity of the animal past. For Ernest Bloch, the primeval forest with its thick sp.a.w.ning life, its ferocious beasts, its brutish phallic-worshiping humanity, is still here. Before him there still lie the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years of development necessary to make a sapient creature of man.
And he writes like one who has been plunged into a darkness and sadness and bitterness all the greater for the vision of the rainbow that has been given him, for the glimpse he has had of the "pays du soleil," the land of man lifting himself at last from the brute and becoming human.
For he knows too well that only aeons after he is dead will the night finally pa.s.s.
And he is the modern insomuch as the fusion of East and West is illuminated by what he does. The coloration of his orchestra, the cries of his instruments, the line of his melody, the throbbing of his pulses, make us feel the great tide sweeping us on, the wave rolling over all the world. In his art, we feel the earth itself turning toward the light of the East.