Red
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Papers on Musical Subjects
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The Works of Carl Van Vechten
Novels
Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works
The Blind Bow-boy
a cartoon for a stained-glass window
The Tattooed Countess
a romantic novel with a happy ending
Books About Cats
Books About Music
Red
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For Ralph Barton,
with my admiration,
this superfluous pigment for his
immarcescible palette
Red is the colour of youth. Oxen and turkeys are always enraged when they see it.
Some ill-considered author once formulated a theory, which since has gained considerably more currency than it deserves, that the corps of critics is recruited from the ranks of unsuccessful novelists. It would be more easy to credit the converse of this fantastic supposition. Indeed, if nine-tenths of our novelists were critics it would not be possible for them to write such bad novels. Speaking for myself, I may say that I was both a dramatic and a music critic before I had conceived the idea that I should ever write a novel.
Ten or twelve years ago, Miss Geraldine Farrar remarked to an interviewer that singers should retire at the age of forty. In conversation, at any rate, I remember often to have expressed myself similarly in regard to critics of music. When I was younger I held the firm belief that after forty the cells hardened and that prejudices were formed which precluded the possibility of the welcoming of novelty. From almost the moment I began to write on the subject of music, therefore, I took it upon myself to attack the older men who had closed their minds to new ideas. However that may be, Miss Farrar did not retire, and I did.
For twenty years, with a fringe of months at either end of this period, I attended a concert or an opera or a play nearly every evening, and, for long stretches, nearly every afternoon as well. There have been countless occasions on which I have heard parts of three or four operas and concerts during the same evening. This consistent activity was carried on in several cities: Chicago, New York, London, Paris, Munich, and elsewhere, and for at least sixteen of the twenty years I not only attended these entertainments, I also wrote about them.
Towards the end I grew very tired of this routine. Music, the drama, singers and actors, began to have precious little new to say to me, and I began to have precious little new to say about them. Had I continued, I should have been obliged to repeat myself, besides boring myself to death and running the by no means unlikely risk of catching a series of colds in draughty halls. Also, I recognized the symptoms of age creeping upon me. I began to prefer Johann Strauss waltzes to the last sonatas of Beethoven; Chopin pleased me more than Brahms. I determined, therefore, to step aside to make way for the younger generation, who are hereby given permission to transfer what I said ten years ago about Stravinsky and Satie to Darius Milhaud and the young Italians.
There was a still more pregnant reason for my desertion of the camp of musical criticism. I seemed always to be about ten years ahead of most of the other critics and the orchestral conductors who make out programs. I missed the reviling of Wagner in New York, but I have watched the pundits of the press revile, in turn, Richard Strauss, Debussy, and Stravinsky, only, in the end, after their ears, through repeated hearings, had grown accustomed to the new clang-tints, to accept these composers as part of the sacred hierarchy. My orchestral education was carried on under Theodore Thomas in Chicago. Now Thomas was not a great conductor, although he always gave honest musical readings of his scores, but he had one great virtue: he believed that new music should be heard. He performed, therefore, every important European composition as soon as possible after it had been performed abroad. As a result, when I arrived in New York in 1906, having listened to and appraised nearly all the major works of Strauss and Debussy composed up to that date, I was amazed to discover that the New York critics were still fighting about these composers, first underpraising them and a little later overpraising them, for Strauss, at any rate, to my mind, has never been a whit superior as a composer to such a man as Liszt. In Paris, in 1913, I heard Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps and a good deal more of this Russian's music. I wrote a panegyric about Le Sacre du Printemps in my first book,[1] published in 1915. In 1924, Le Sacre du Printemps has at last been performed in New York and the critics have at last accepted Stravinsky. So, indeed, apparently, have the conductors who, until the past four years, hardly ever permitted his name to be emblazoned on their programs. The job of music critic in New York, therefore, is certainly not an ideal occupation for a man with imagination and foresight.
I might further urge that there were economic reasons for my shift of professions, for I realized but small sums of silver from this great outlay of labour. My stipend from the newspapers for which I worked was decidedly modest; the several volumes of criticism which I published, while encomiastically reviewed (Henry Mencken hailed even my first book with delight, seeing in it possibly, as did Peter Whiffle, the germ of future achievement), enjoyed but a small sale. Most of them, indeed, were "remaindered." I doubt if any one makes money out of music criticism. The late James Huneker, as prominent an exponent of the profession as any one I could name offhand, died poor, notwithstanding the fact that he had always led an extremely simple life. I wonder if even Ernest Newman, probably the best living critic of music—or if not the best critic, at least the best writer on music—is driving about in a Rolls-Royce? Music criticism is poorly paid because it is poorly read. A novel, which is perhaps twice as easy to write—for any one who can write it at all—as such a book as the one that follows this preface, a novel, I say, which requires even in extreme instances about one-third as much documentation or fundamental knowledge as even a book like this poor Red, not only brings one money, it also brings one readers.
To be perfectly frank, however, I must state that the matter of economics never really entered into the question of my decision. Henry James once wrote, and he was writing about critics: "The sense of effort is easily lost in the enthusiasm of curiosity." When I first began to attend the opera and concerts and the theatre I went because I liked to go. It was, I honestly believe, a desire to broaden my prospects in these respects that got me out of the state of Iowa, where opportunities of this nature were meagre. I think it was the primary reason for my leaving Chicago, after I had spent seven years in that city. I am sure that a hankering to hear Wagner in Munich was the inspiration for my first trip to Europe. Up until about the year 1918, in fact, my enthusiasm for the art under discussion sustained me in the belief that I should be writing about music throughout the length and breadth of my career. About that date I began to nourish doubts; sketches foreshadowing my future fictions began to appear in my books; I became uneasy in the concert hall; in short, I began to realize that I was nearly through. The last two papers in this volume reflect some of the reasons for this metamorphosis.
Certainly, I do not regret those years. They supplied me with not a little knowledge and experience; they served to introduce me, in one way or another, to most of the famous people of the period, but when a thing is done, it is done, at least so far as I am concerned. I have not entered an opera house for several seasons, and my recent attendance on the concert hall has been limited to a few special occasions.
I am delighted to see that many of my suggestions and prophecies have been realized. When I published my book about Spanish music, not one orchestral composition by a Spaniard, at least so far as I am aware, had yet been performed in our concert halls. This absurd state of affairs has since been remedied. Stravinsky, whom I have considered, since I first became acquainted with his music eleven years ago, the most important of living composers, is now generally recognized as such. As for my plea that American popular music be taken more seriously, Eva Gauthier recently devoted an entire group on a recital program to jazz songs; a celebrated pianist has included Zez Confrey's Kitten on the Keys in his repertory; Paul Whiteman has given a series of concerts devoted to American jazz, which have created a sensation in musical circles (even Mengelberg has come forward with his word of commendation); more than all, George Gershwin has composed and performed his Rhapsody in Blue, a work in concerto form for piano and orchestra, in which jazz is utilized in a musicianly manner (as I predicted it would be in The Great American Composer) to create just the effect that Liszt got into his rhapsodies by a use of Hungarian tunes, or Albéniz into his Iberia suite, which is based on suggestions in melody and rhythm of Spanish popular dances. Jazz may not be the last hope of American music, nor yet the best hope, but at present, I am convinced, it is its only hope.
There remained to solve, however, the problem of my early books, most of which are out of print, and which, for sufficiently good reasons, I shall never republish in their original forms or under their original titles. These volumes naturally contain much material that I should never care to reprint; moreover the later volumes include not only papers on musical subjects but also my first attempts at fictional sketches, for it was necessary for me to convince myself that I could write fiction before I undertook to do so on a large scale. There were also to be considered a number of papers which had appeared in magazines, but which had not yet been published in book form.
After a reperusal of the books in question—I may say that it is a habit of mine never to reread one of my books after it has come out, except for some reason like the present one—I have selected such papers on musical subjects as I care to preserve, save for a few dealing with specific composers, later to find their niches in a book to be entitled Excavations, which will also include papers on certain figures in the literary world whose reputations I have had some share in rescuing from comparative obscurity.
Music for the Movies is lifted from Music and Bad Manners; Why Music Is Unpopular, The Great American Composer, and The Importance of Electrical Picture Concerts, from Interpreters and Interpretations; The Authoritative Work on American Music and The New Art of the Singer, from The Merry-Go-Round; Variations on a Theme by Havelock Ellis, On the Relative Difficulties of Depicting Heaven and Hell in Music, and On the Rewriting of Masterpieces, from In the Garret. Of the other three papers, none of which has previously been published in a book, Movies for Program Notes appeared in The Wave; On Hearing What You Want When You Want It, in The Musical Quarterly, and Cordite for Concerts, in The Smart Set.
I cannot say that I subscribe to all the general ideas expressed herein; as a matter of fact, they are not all entirely consistent, a state of affairs to have been expected in the work of a writer who apparently at heart was always creative rather than critical, but I believed them when I wrote them and that condition gives them whatever value they may now possess. They are, fortunately, dated. In all these papers I have made omissions, altered words and phrases, added a few others, and appended footnotes. On the whole, however, I have left them as they were; they are, therefore, not to be regarded as rewritten; they may be said to represent with some accuracy a phase and a period of my career which in all likelihood is at an end.
New York.
March 11, 1924.
Contents
Papers on Musical Subjects
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published in 1925, before the cutoff of January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1964, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 59 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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