Parsifal

After many years of writing I have learnt most of the provocative statements of opinion, and one of the most provocative of all is to say anything derogatory about Parsifal. So I was not surprised when our esteemed Madrid correspondent, Señor Nueda y Santiago, wrote to rebuke my slighting allusion to it. To Señor Nueda Parsifal is not only "the most beautiful, superb and astonishing masterpiece of music ever written, but the most beautiful, superb and amazing masterpiece ever produced in any art." Now, Señor Nueda has written an extremely interesting book on the aestheties of music, De Musica, with most of which I should agree, and he on his side cordially approves of my choice of music for that imaginary desert island. Equally we should agree absolutely with one another in our admiration of the Ring, and yet Parsifai affects us both quite differently. Señor Nueda does not mind whether Parsifal be Christian, heathen, Buddhist, or theosophist." In the dedication to Richard Wagner with which he prefaces his book he writes "My mother taught me to pray and to believe. In material, I learnt to doubt. You restore my faith, because when I enjoy your divine music I am aware of my soul and I believe in it."

My trouble with Parsifal is that I am incapable of accepting Wagner's sincerity of belief. He takes a great Christian legend and theatricalises it. It is not a dogmatic necessity for a Christian to believe in the Holy Grail, but if a Christian believes in the dogma which inspired the legend he finds it impossible to forgive the distortion of it in Wagner's treatment. Nietzsche's attack upon Parsifal gave Parsifal a kind of religious kudos, but an orthodox Christian ought to agree with much of what Nietzsche said about it. It is impossible to imagine Nietzsche's attacking the music of Palestrina any more effectively than a clothes'-moth could attack a granite monolith. Nevertheless, although I shall never myself derive any emotional, intellectual, or even purely musical pleasure from Parsifai, the very reasons for which I condemn it compel me to recognise the right of its admirers to claim a magic for its influence.

Señor Nueda has many other interesting observations to make in a letter he has written to me, not the least interesting of which is his appreciation as a Spaniard of Strauss's Don Quixote. "No one has ever been able to translate into musical language the nobility and fairness of Cervantes' Don Quixote as well as Richard Strauss. All other music written round Don Quixote is poor and vulgar, and Falla's Retablo de Maese Pedro is an absolute caricature. The Don Quixote of Strauss is so human and so beautiful and so worthy of Cervantes' knight-errant that every time I listen to it with ear and soul (in Beecham's superb performance on that Columbia recording) – I regret the shortness of the score and wish that Strauss had transcribed into music the whole immortal book and composed fifty variations instead of ten."

Don Quixote may belong to the whole world, but that does not exempt us from listening with particular respect to the testimony of one of his fellow-countrymen. Strauss is still suffering from the reaction against excessive laudation and it is probably too early to estimate his final place in music. It may well be higher than contemporary opinion as a whole supposes.

The Choral Symphony

The new HMV album of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in D minor played by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski with American singers and chorus is on the whole the best version of this great work we have had so far for the gramophone. It is far from being an ideal version, but it has one great advantage, which is that it improves as it goes along, the interpretation of the first movement being the least satisfactory. The second movement seems to lack some of the glorious elan which it ought to have, but the adagio cantabile of the third movement is good, after which there is a set-hack during that strange and dramatic piece of musical dialogue which leads up to the final tune. The choral finale, however, is admirable.

This great symphony had a most protracted gestation. As early as 1793, when Beethoven was twenty two, Schiller's sister, Charlotte, was being told in a letter of a young man from Bonn who was intending to set Schiller's Ode to Joy to music. In 1812 there is a note among the sketches for the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies in the composer's notebook about a symphony in D minor. The beginning of the theme of the second movement appears in the notebook of 1815, but it was not until 1822 that he began to sketch out the Ninth Symphony, without any idea then apparently of a choral finale for this, although in 1818 he had been contemplating an almost entirely choral symphony. In the note about this he puts. down as an idea that the violins in the last movement should be ten times as many as usual! There is no doubt that had Beethoven lived like Verdi for eighty years in lull possession of his faculties he would have set Berlioz and Wagner and Strauss a hard task in the way of competitive noise. It was in 1822 that the London Philharmonic Society offered fifty pounds to Beethoven for a new symphony, and this offer seems to have kept him at work on the Ninth. Fifty pounds in 1822 would have been the equivalent, I suppose, of about two hundred pounds today. Beethoven accepted the offer, and the money was sent him in December 1822. Beethoven, however, never revealed to his friends that he had received this money. He finished the Ninth during 1823, and in March of the following year offered it with the Mass in D to a Viennese publisher for six hundred guilders, although apparently Schott had already been offered these works and paid an instalment on them. In August 1824 he was writing to Probst, the Viennese publisher, as follows "As to the symphony, which is the biggest I have written, and for which I have already had foreign offers, there is still the possibility of your obtaining it. You must, however, make your mind up quickly, for I have already received part of the fee for it, but could balance that with other works. Although God is very good to me (for I, in turn, help where and when I can) and I am never short of a publisher, nevertheless I like things to go smoothly. If I could give the other person in question something else, I should not worry about it and could relinquish the symphony to you, but it must not appear before July of next year. Taking into account the time for printing and correcting, the interval is not so great. Meanwhile, keep this as a secret and do not mention it to others."

Finally, in February 1825, he gave the symphony to Schott, and it was published in 1826 with a dedication to Frederick William III of Prussia, though he recognised the fifty pounds of the London Philharmonic Society with an autograph to say that the symphony was written for the Society. The Ninth was first performed at Vienna in May 1824, and it was first performed in London in March 1825.

In the excellent analytical note to the HMV album from which I have taken the story of these negotiations, "WL" points out that they bring us "face to face with one of the aspects of Beethoven's character that was for years concealed or glossed over by Beethoven's biographers – his lack of absolute integrity in dealing with publishers." I admit that superficially the business of the Ninth Symphony does suggest a bit of double-dealing, and if Beethoven had been selling soap or sugar instead of a symphony I suppose his business methods would be questionable; but, when we examine the transaction a little closer, there is really nothing to he charged against Beethoven. The London Philharmonic Society offered him fifty pounds to write a symphony, but there is no evidence that they expected the full publishing rights, and we may take it that they were satisfied with the written assurance from Beethoven that the symphony had been written for them. That Beethoven should write to an Austrian publisher and talk about foreign offers in order to bring him up to the scratch was surely legitimate! There are very few composers or authors at the present day who have not used American publishers as a means to extract a little more money from their English publishers. And in the end Beethoven accepted the offer from Schott, from whom he had received an instalment. Probst had set his heart on the Ninth Symphony and the Missa solemnis; he could have paid up for it and clinched the bargain. Beethoven recognised that he owed Schott money and was prepared to fulfil his side of the obligation by giving him other works. There is nothing beyond his paying for them to show that Schott was particularly anxious for the Ninth Symphony and the Mass.

Authors in old days were often imposed upon by publishers, and in the whole history of transactions between them there is probably still a heavy debit against publishers. The layman may not be convinced by my defence of Beethoven, but nobody who has attempted a magnum opus can feel anything but sympathy with him. The real trouble was that when he began to think about the money for the Ninth Symphony he had not yet realised what an immense work it was going to be. If the London Philharmonic Society's offer had come along when he was in the middle of the Eighth Symphony he might easily have considered himself well paid for it with fifty pounds. Nor is there any reason to suppose that the Society would have been anything but perfectly satisfied with a symphony like the Eighth. The problem of size has always been a knotty one with artists. Whistler's row with Mr Anthony Eden's father was over size. Sir William Eden commissioned a small portrait, but Whistler, carried away by his subject, painted a large one, and expected the Baronet to fork out accordingly. Both were in the wrong and both were in the right. The layman may think, too, that these are rather sordid preliminaries to a stupendous work of art like the Choral Symphony, but the sooner the layman realises that it is only the dilettante amateur who can afford to rise superior to such sordid preliminaries the better for the future of art. Probably, indeed certainly, there has never been in the history of the world a period when so many gifted and ungifted amateurs were writing not for a living but for a hobby, and this dilettantism is reflected everywhere in the artistic output of the time. Beethoven may have been the greatest composer who has yet been born, but from the beginning to the end of his life he was a hardworking professional musician. Apropos of that, by the way, I was listening in the other night on my HMV set to that excellent nightly programme from Stuttgart which is one of the joys of my life and heard a delicious series of those Scots songs which Beethoven set for an enterprising Scots publisher. Why does not one of our native singers give us some of these songs over the wireless ? And if they were a success we might get some of them for the gramophone. One of the best records in my original collection was Faithful Johnnie sung by – was it Maartje Offers?

I have written so much at various times about the Choral Symphony that I am not now going to discuss the work itself at length. One new impression, however, did register upon my fancy on playing through this latest version, and that was the extraordinary similarity in the emotion of the final ode to some of the more genial expressions of our contemporary Bolshevism. The artistic controllers of the Russian proletariat have missed a great opportunity by not arranging for massed choirs to sing this ode at moments of Communistic expansiveness. The final effect of it is really as fatuous as the mechanised emotion of human brotherhood in the terms of Lenin. Romain Rolland, who may perhaps be accounted the leading sentimentalist of modern Europe, writes of the finale of the Ninth Symphony: "When the storm has reached its climax, the darkness is torn asunder, night is driven from the skies, and the serenity of day is restored by an act of will-power. What conquest . . . can equal the glory of that superhuman effort, the most brilliant victory ever achieved by the human soul? A poor, unhappy, solitary being suffering incarnate in man— to whom the world had refused happiness, now creates joy himself that he may endow the world with it. He forges out of his own sufferings, as he has expressed it in those lofty words which résumé his whole life and are the watch-words of every heroic soul – 'Through pain to gladness.'

I suppose it is possible to feel like this after listening to the final ode, but the real finale of the Ninth Symphony is the Missa solemnis. These two great works are inseparable. Nobody can appreciate either without the other.

At Last!

I find it difficult to express the gratitude I am feeling at this moment to the Decca Company, Sir Henry Wood and the Queen's Hall Orchestra for this Fifth Symphony of Beethoven recorded on four 12-inch discs at HALF-A-CROWN apiece. Broadcast Records once made a most laudable effort to publish some of the great musical classics cheaply, but with the best will in the world it was impossible to say more of them than that they were wonderful for the price. It was impossible to tell our readers that they were losing nothing by being content with those Broadcast versions of the classics that they had hitherto been unable to afford. No such inhibition weighs down a recommendation of this Decca Fifth Symphony, and I have no hesitation in affirming that with its publication Sir Henry Wood has set the seal on the great work he began on behalf of British music with the first Promenade Concert at Queen's Hall some forty years ago. This Fifth Symphony is authentic Queen's Hall at its best. The recording is majestic and at the same time crystal clear. There is never a moment when one fails to see Sir Henry Wood for the trees. You can almost smell the pipe-smoke of forty years ago, and no doubt contemporary youth will smell with equal assurance the smoke of to-day's gaspers. There must still be very many readers of THE GRAMOPHONE who do not yet possess a recorded version of the Fifth Symphony. They can now obtain one for TEN SHILLINGS which in all essentials is as good as any other – for sixpence less than the were paying a short while ago for the records of three greasy queasy crooners.

Besides the Fifth Symphony Sir Henry Wood and Decca have given us a fine rousing Ride of the Vaikyries for half-a-crown, and for another half-crown Sir Henry's orchestrations of Dvorak's Humoreske and Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C minor, the popularity of which I need not stress. It is cheering to read that we are to get Bach, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, and Wagner in this wonderful series, which will be an enduring souvenir of the Proms, and all that the Proms have meant to so many thousands, young and old, when (incredible and distasteful thought!) Sir Henry Wood himself has laid down his baton for the last time. Merely to express our appreciation of his great services to music and our affection for the man who has given so much to our artistic life it would be a gesture to lose no time in buying these records. There is no need, however, to bother about courtesy, recognition, or gratitude. They are good records. It is worth noting that I played through the whole Fifth Symphony without being called upon to clip my fibre needle. These records will be an addition to the library of the most fastidious. Readers always know when I am trying to be kind and when I am genuinely enthusiastic. I regard this alliance between Decca and Sir Henry Wood as a matter of national importance.

Miscellaneous

Mr Montagu Nathan writes to rebuke me for alluding to Szigeti as a violinist who became famous after the war and points out that his first appearance in England as a boy followed after a brief interval that of Mischa Elman in 1905. I suppose I was thinking in terms of the gramophone, and that must be my excuse.

His letter continues:

"You also refer to Vieuxtemps' Fourth Concerto as material which is valuable for the purpose of getting into people's heads the sound of a well-played violin. Having been taught this work about twenty-five years ago by Eugène Ysaÿe (who was a pupil of Vieuxtemps) I may claim sufficient acquaintance with it to declare my opinion that, with all due respect to its composer, it is quite easy to get the sound of a well-played violin into people's heads without resorting to such negligible examples as that particular composition."

The point I was trying to drive home was that the English as a nation tend to dislike the sound of the violin. You can even observe this in the neglect of it by English dance bands. The favourite instruments of the English are the organ and the cornet, just as the really popular instrument in Scotland and in most Latin countries is the accordion, and in Central Europe the violin, though both in Scotland and in Ireland, and, I daresay, in Wales, the sound of the violin gives much greater pleasure than in England. Therefore, in recommending a superb piece of fiddling like this performance of Heifetz in the Vieuxtemps Concerto, I was thinking less of the musical value of the work than of its obvious popular appeal, and I venture to argue that any composition which can lend itself to such superb fiddling cannot be dismissed as entirely negligible.

Mr. Nathan's letter concludes "I am the proud owner of a superb Tom, and I therefore deeply resent your comparison of the love-song of this aristocat with the nauseous utterance of such a creature as the common crooner."

Well, here I must admit I am in agreement with my correspondent, and I apologise to felinity.

The Mozart Society and Others

The first album of the Mozart Society, which consists of the ensemble numbers from Le nozze di Figaro, is a brilliant success, and if the solos which I presume will make up the second volume maintain this high level we shall have for the gramophone a representative performance of this enchanting opera. The orchestra and chorus are that of the Glyndebourne Mozart Opera Festival of 1934. The conductor is Fritz Busch, the producer is Karl Ebert, and the cast with three exceptions is made up from British singers. Nobody will suspect me of the smallest prejudice in favour of British singers in opera and to say that I was agreeably surprised by their performance is to put it very mildly. Of course they are not singing in English, and that has helped them considerably. The famous finale of the second act, which is surely the finest finale in the whole of opera, is carried through with a verve and a sparkle beyond praise. The hope I ventured to express that a literal English translation would accompany the Italian libretto was granted, and it has been neatly done by F. We have been waiting for years for these ensembles and if everybody who has written to THE GRAMOPHONE to plead for a complete recording of a Mozart opera makes haste to obtain this first volume the next volume brought out under the auspices of His Master's Voice should be a best seller. I have already had occasion to compliment Mr Walter Legge several times on his excellent forewords and notes to albums, and in this brochure he is at the top of his form. His next enterprise is to launch under the auspices of Columbia the English Music Society. The project is to give a comprehensive collection of English music from Byrd to Bax, from Wilbye to William Walton. The first volume will be devoted to Purcell and will include the four-part Fantasias, the Golden Sonata, and various unpublished catches. In pre-electric days William Primrose made an exquisite recording of the Golden Sonata, and although he has now deserted the violin for the viola he is to pick up his violin again in order to make this new recording of the Golden Sonata. This is good news. Arnold Bax is to have the second volume, which will include the Viola Sonata, the Nonett, and if the support given to Volume One and the guarantee of support for Volume Three justify it, The Garden of Fand or even Symphony Number Three will be added. That if, however, is a pretty big if, for it will be impossible for the English Music Society to undertake big orchestral works without at least a thousand subscribers.

To be frank, news of support from our readers for the Anthologie Sonore has not been so encouraging as to tempt me into supposing that it will be an easy task to obtain a thousand members for the English Music Society. Yet, I cannot bring myself to believe that there are not a thousand people in this country able and willing to support their own music. The recording companies have been dauntless in the way they have sponsored these societies, which have been much criticised chiefly from a conviction in the public mind that no big trading concern does anything unless a huge profit is attached to it. I am speaking without any special information, but I will hazard a guess that very little money has been made out of all the albums issued to subscribers of the various societies. The Schöne Müllerin and the Fourth Volume of the Hugo Wolf Society still have room for subscribers, and unless there is a better response to these lieder albums there seems little chance of getting Schumann and Brahms albums, both of which are badly wanted, but, alas, apparently not by enough people.

Some Recent Records

Nothing could be better than the light-blue Columbia record of the Léner Quartet playing the Andante Cantabile from Tchaikovsky's Quartet in D major. Interpretation, execution, and recording are perfect. Delightful, too, is Rossiniana played by the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Beecham on two light-blue Columbia discs. The arrangement of these pieces is by Respighi, who is a past-master at arrangements of Rossini. The recording is of the quality of all the other Beecham-Columbia recordings. And you know what that means.

I do not remember a previous recording of Dvorak's Quartet in A flat major, and the performance by the Prague String Quartet on three HMV red discs of this lovely work is most welcome. I agree with AR that the Fourth movement is something of an anticlimax after those wonderful and uplifting melodies in the first three movements, but there are very few quartets in which the final movement does not let one down a little. I think the most conspicuous example of this is the Fourth movement of Beethoven's Harp Quartet.

One vocal record stood out last month and that was the red HMV disc of Lily Pons singing 'Una voce poco fa', which is a really brilliant piece of coloratura singing, although, as HFVL points out, it is not a perfect interpretation of the dramatic aspect of the aria, and it should be remembered that Rossini was always dramatic. Never mind, we do not often get such coloratura nowadays.

On a Parlophone-Odeon ten-inch disc we had the same soprano in the Bell Song from Lakmé, and a delicious affair Lily Pons has made of it.

From Decca-Polydor we had a most welcome recording of Mozart's Quartet in E flat played by the Prisca Quartet on four ten-inch discs, which means ten shillings for an exquisite piece of chamber music, and another bargain at seven and six is Beethoven's Sonata in E flat with Franz Von Vecsey on the violin and Guido Agosti on the piano. I hope that these Decca-Polydor bargains in chamber music will become a constant feature of succeeding months.

COMPTON MACKENZIE.