Part 26

Although it was an urgent matter that young French composers should unite to withstand the general indifference of the public, it was more urgent still that that indifference should be attacked, and that music should be brought within reach of ordinary people. It was a matter of taking up and completing Pasdeloup's work in a more artistic and more modern spirit.

A publisher of music, Georges Hartmann, feeling the forces that were drawing together in French art, gathered about him the greater part of the talented men of the young school--Franck, Bizet, Saint-Saens, Massenet, Delibes, Lalo, A. de Castillon, Th. Dubois, Guiraud, Godard, Paladilhe, and Joncieres--and undertook to produce their works in public. He rented the Odeon theatre, and got together an orchestra, the conductorship of which he entrusted to M. Edouard Colonne. And on 2 March, 1873, the Concert National was inaugurated in a musical matinee, where M. Saint-Saens played his Concerto in G minor and Mme. Viardot sang Schubert's Roi des Aulnes. In the first year six ordinary concerts were given, and, besides that, two sacred concerts with choirs, at which Cesar Franck's Redemption and Massenet's Marie-Magdeleine were performed. In 1874 the Odeon was abandoned for the Chatelet. This venture attracted some attention, and the concerts were patronised by the public; but the financial results were not great. Hartmann was discouraged and wished to give the whole thing up. But M. Edouard Colonne conceived the idea of turning his orchestra into a society, and of continuing the work under the name of Association Artistique. Among the artist-founders were MM. Bruneau, Benjamin Godard, and Paul Hillemacher. Its early days were full of struggle; but owing to the perseverance of the Association all obstacles were finally overcome. In 1903 a festival was held to celebrate its thirtieth anniversary. During these thirty years it had given more than eight hundred concerts, and had performed the works of about three hundred composers, of which half were French. The four composers most frequently heard at the Chatelet were Saint-Saens, Wagner, Beethoven, and Berlioz.

Berlioz is almost the exclusive property of the Chatelet. Not only have they performed his works there more frequently than anywhere else, but they are better understood there than in other places. The Colonne orchestra and its conductor, gifted with great warmth of spirit,--though it is sometimes a little intemperate--are rather bothered by works of a classic nature and by those that show contemplative feeling; but they give wonderful expression to Berlioz's tumultuous romanticism, his poetic enthusiasm, and the bright and delicate colouring of his paintings and his musical landscapes. Although Berlioz has his place at the Chevillard and Conservatoire concerts, it is to the Chatelet that his followers flock; and their enthusiasm has not been affected by the campaign that for several years has been directed against Berlioz by some French critics under the influence of the younger musical party--the followers of d'Indy and Debussy.

It is also at the Chatelet that the keenest musical passion has been preserved in the public, even to this day. Thanks to the size of the theatre, which is one of the largest in Paris, and to the great number of cheap seats, you may always find there a number of young students who make the most interested kind of public possible. And the music is something more than a pleasure to them--it is a necessity. There are some that make great sacrifices in order to have a seat at the Sunday concerts. And many of these young men and women live all the week on the thought of forgetting the world for a few hours in musical enjoyment. Such a public did not exist in France before 1870. It is to the honour of the Chatelet and the Pasdeloup concerts to have created it.

Edouard Colonne has done more than educate musical taste in France; for no one has worked harder than he to break down the barriers that separated the French public from the art of other lands; and, at the same time, he has himself helped to make French art known to foreigners. When he himself was conducting concerts all over Europe he entrusted the conductorship at the Chatelet to the great German Kapellmeister and to foreign composers--to Richard Strauss, Grieg, Tschaikowsky, Hans Richter, Hermann Levi, Mottl, Nikisch, Mengelberg, Siegfried Wagner, and many others. No other conductor has done so much for Parisian music during the last thirty years; and we must not forget it.

The Lamoureux concerts have had from the beginning a very different character from the Colonne concerts. That difference lies partly in the personality of the two conductors, and partly in the fact that the Lamoureux concerts, although of later date than the Colonne concerts by less than ten years, represent a new generation in music. The progress of the musical public was singularly rapid: hardly had they explored the rich treasure-house of Berlioz's music than they were making discoveries in the world of Wagner. And in that world they needed a new guide, who had intimate knowledge of Wagner's art and of German art in general. Charles Lamoureux was that guide. In 1873 he conducted special performances of Bach and Haendel, given by the Societe de l'Harmonie sacree. After leaving the conductorship of the Opera, he inaugurated, on 21 October, 1881, at the Chateau-d'Eau theatre, the Societe des Nouveaux Concerts. These concerts had at first very comprehensive programmes of every kind of music and every kind of school. At the first concert there were works of Beethoven, Haendel, Gluck, Sacchini, Cimarosa, and Berlioz. In the first year Lamoureux had Beethoven's Ninth Symphony performed, as well as a large part of Lohengrin, and numerous works of young French musicians. Various compositions of Lalo, Vincent d'Indy, and Chabrier, were performed there for the first time. But it was especially to the study of Wagner's works that Lamoureux most gladly devoted himself. It was he who gave the first hearings of Wagner in their entirety in France, such as the first and second act of Tristan, in 1884-1885. The Wagnerian battle was still going on at that time, as the notice printed at the head of the programme of Tristan shows.

"The management of the Societe des Nouveaux Concerts is desirous of avoiding any disturbance during the performance of the second act of Tristan, and urgently and respectfully begs that the audience will abstain from giving any mark of their approval or disapproval before the end of the act."

The same year, in the Eden theatre, to which the concerts had been transferred, Lamoureux conducted, for the first time in Paris, the first act of the Walkuere. In these concerts the tenor, Van Dyck, made his debut; later, he was one of the leading performers at Bayreuth. In 1886-1887 Lamoureux rehearsed and conducted the only performance of Lohengrin at the Eden theatre. Disturbances in the streets prevented further performances. Lamoureux then established himself in the concert-room of the Cirque des Champs Elysees, where for eleven years he has given what are called the Concerts-Lamoureux. He continued to spread the knowledge of Wagner's works, and has sometimes had the help of some of the most celebrated of the Bayreuth artists, among others, that of Mme. Materna and Lilli Lehmann. At the end of the season of 1897 Lamoureux wished to disband his orchestra in order to conduct concerts abroad. But the members of the orchestra decided to remain together under the name of the Association des Concerts-Lamoureux, with Lamoureux's son-in-law, M. Camille Chevillard, as conductor. But Lamoureux was not long before he returned to the conductorship of the concerts, which had now returned to the Chateau-d'Eau theatre; and a few months before his death, in 1899, he conducted the first performance of Tristan at the Nouveau theatre. And so he had the happiness of being present at the complete triumph of the cause for which he had fought so stubbornly for nearly twenty years.

Lamoureux's performances of Wagner's works have been among the best that have ever been given. He had a regard for the work as a whole and a care for its details, to which the Colonne orchestra did not quite attain. On the other hand, Lamoureux's defect was the exuberant liveliness with which he interpreted compositions of a romantic nature. He did not fully understand these works; and although he knew much more about classic art than his rival, he rendered its letter rather than its spirit, and paid such sedulous attention to detail that music like Beethoven's lost its intensity and its life. But both his talents and his defects fitted him to be an excellent interpreter of the young neo-Wagnerian school, the principal representatives of which in France were then M. Vincent d'Indy and M. Emmanuel Chabrier. Lamoureux had need, to a certain extent, to be himself directed either by the living traditions of Bayreuth, or by the thought of modern and living composers; and the greatest service he rendered to French music was his creation, thanks to his extreme care for material perfection, of an orchestra that was marvellously equipped for symphonic music.

This seeking for perfection has been carried on by his successor, M. Camille Chevillard, whose orchestra is even more refined still. One may say, I think, that it is to-day the best in Paris. M. Chevillard is more attracted by pure music than Lamoureux was; and he rightly finds that dramatic music has been occupying too large a place in Parisian concerts. In a letter published by the Mercure de France, in January, 1903, he reproaches the educators of public taste with having fostered a liking for opera, and with not having awakened a respect for pure music: "Any four bars from one of Mozart's quartettes have," he says, "a greater educational value than a showy scene from an opera." No one in Paris conducts classic works better than he, especially the works that possess clean, plastic beauty; and in Germany itself it would be difficult to find anyone who would give a more delicate interpretation of some of Haendel's and Mozart's symphonic works. His orchestra has kept, moreover, the superiority that it had already acquired in its repertory of Wagner's works. But M. Chevillard has communicated a warmth and energy of rhythm to it that it did not possess before. His interpretations of Beethoven, even if they are somewhat superficial, are very full of life. Like Lamoureux, he has hardly caught the spirit of French romantic works--of Berlioz, and still less of Franck and his school; and he seems to have but lukewarm sympathy for the more recent developments of French music. But he understands well the German romantic composers, especially Schumann, for whom he has a marked liking; and he tried, though without great success, to introduce Liszt and Brahms into France, and was the first among us to attract real attention to Russian music, whose brilliant and delicate colouring he excels in rendering. And, like M. Colonne, he has brought the great German Kapellmeister among us--Weingartner, Nikisch, and Richard Strauss, the last mentioned having directed the first performance in Paris of his symphonic poems, Zarathustra, Don Quixote, and Heldenleben, at the Lamoureux concerts.

Nothing could have better completed the musical education of the public than this continuous defile, for the past ten years, of Kapellmeister and foreign virtuosi, and the comparisons that their different styles and interpretations afforded. Nothing has better helped forward the improvement of Parisian orchestras than the emulation brought about by the meetings between Parisian conductors and those of other countries. At present our own conductors are worthy rivals of the best in Germany. The string instruments are good; the wood has kept its old French superiority; and though the brass is still the weakest part of our orchestras, it has made great progress. One may still criticise the grouping of orchestras at concerts, for it is often defective; there is a disproportion between the different families of instruments and, in consequence, between their different sonorities, some of which are too thin and others too dull. But these defects are fairly common all over Europe to-day. Unhappily, more peculiar to France is the insufficiency or poor quality of the choirs, whose progress has been far from keeping pace with that of the orchestras. It is to this side of music that the directors of concerts must now bring their efforts to bear.

The Lamoureux Concerts have not had as stable a dwelling-place as the Chatelet Concerts. They have wandered about Paris from one room to another--from the Cirque d'Hiver to the Cirque d'Ete, and from the Chateau-d'Eau to the Nouveau Theatre. At the present moment they are in the Salle Gaveau, which is much too small for them. In spite of the progress of music and musical taste, Paris has not yet a concert-hall, as the smallest provincial towns in Germany have; and this shameful indifference, unworthy of the artistic renown of Paris, obliges the symphonic societies to take refuge in circuses or theatres, which they share with other kinds of performers, though the acoustics of these places are not intended for concerts. And so it happens that for six years the Chevillard Concerts have been given at the back of a music-hall, which has the same entrance, and which is only separated from the concert-room by a small passage, so that the roaring choruses of a danse du venire may mingle with an adagio of Beethoven's or a scene from the Tetralogy. Worse than this, the smallness of the place into which these concerts have been crammed has been a serious obstacle in the way of making them popular. Nevertheless, in the promenade and galleries of the Nouveau Theatre, in later years, arose what may be called a little war over concertos. It was rather a curious episode in the history of the musical taste of Paris, and merits a few words here. In every country, but especially in those countries that are least musical, a virtuoso profits by public favour, often to the detriment of the work he is performing; for what is most liked in music is the musician. The virtuoso--whose importance must not be underrated, and who is worthy of honour when he is a reverential and sympathetic interpreter of genius--has too often taken a lamentable part, especially in Latin countries, in the degrading of musical taste; for empty virtuosity makes a desert of art. The fashion of inept fantasias and acrobatic variations has, it is true, gone by; but of late years virtuosity has returned in an offensive way, and, sheltering itself under the solemn classical name of "concertos," it usurped a place of rather exaggerated importance in symphony concerts, and especially in M. Chevillard's concerts--a place which Lamoureux would never have given it. Then the younger and more enthusiastic part of the public began to revolt; and very soon, with perfect impartiality and quite indiscriminately, began to hiss famous and obscure virtuosi alike in their performance of any concerto, whether it was splendid or detestable. Nothing found favour with them--neither the playing of Paderewski, nor the music of Saint-Saens and the great masters. The management of the concerts went its own way and tried in vain to put out the disturbers, and to forbid them entry to the concert-room; and the battle went on for a long time, and critics were drawn into it. But in spite of its ridiculous excesses, and the barbarism of the methods by which the parterre expressed its opinions, that quarrel is not without interest. It proved how a passion and enthusiasm for music had been roused in France; and the passion, though unjust in its expression, was more fruitful and of far greater worth than indifference.

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3. The Schola Cantorum

The Lamoureux Concerts had served their purpose, and, in their turn, their heroic mission came to an end. They had forced Wagner on Paris; and Paris, as always, had overshot the mark, and could swear by no one but Wagner. French musicians were translating Gounod's or Massenet's ideas into Wagner's style; Parisian critics repeated Wagner's theories at random, whether they understood them or not--generally when they did not understand them. A reaction was inevitable directly Paris was well saturated with Wagner; and it came about in 1890, among a chosen few, some of whom had been, and were even still, under Wagner's influence. It was at first only a mild reaction, and showed itself in a return to the classics of the past and to the great primitives in music.

There had been several attempts in this direction before, but none of them had succeeded in making any impression on the mass of the public. In 1843, Joseph Napoleon Ney, Prince of Moszkowa, founded in Paris a society for the performance of religious and classical vocal music. This society, which the Prince himself conducted in his own house, set itself to perform the vocal works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In 1853, Louis Niedermeyer founded in Paris an Ecole de musique religieuse et classique, which strove "to form singers, organists, choir-masters, and composers of music, by the study of the classic works of the great masters of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries." This school, subsidised by the State, was a nursery for some real musicians. It reckoned among its pupils some noted composers, conductors, organists, and historians; among others, M. Gabriel Faure, M. Andre Messager, M. Eugene Gigout, and M. Henry Expert. M. Saint-Saens was a professor there, and became its president. Nearly five hundred organists, choir-masters, and professors of music of the Conservatoire and other French colleges were trained there. But this school, serious in intention, and a refuge for the classic spirit in the midst of the prevailing bad taste, did not trouble itself about influencing the public, and, in fact, almost ignored it.

Lamoureux attempted in 1873 to perform the great choral works of Bach and Haendel; and in 1878 the celebrated French organist, M. Alexandre Guilmant, ventured to give concerts at the Trocadero for the organ and orchestra, which were devoted to religious music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But the deplorable acoustics of the concert-room had a prejudicial effect on the works that were performed there; and the public did not respond very warmly to M. Guilmant's efforts, and seemed from the first only to find an historical interest in the masterpieces, and to miss their depth and life altogether.

Then a pupil of Franck's, M. Henry Expert, who began his admirable works on Musical History in 1882, laid the foundation of the Societe J.S. Bach, in order to spread the knowledge of ancient music written between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries. And he succeeded in interesting in his undertaking, not only the principal French musicians, such as Cesar Franck, Saint-Saens, and Gounod, but also foreigners, such as Hans von Buelow, Tschaikowsky, Grieg, Sgambati, and Gevaert. Unhappily this society never got farther than arranging what it wanted to do, and only sketched out the plans that were realised later by Charles Bordes.

The general public were not really interested in the art of the old musicians until the Association des Chanteurs de Saint-Gervais was founded in 1892 by Charles Bordes, the choirmaster of the church of Saint-Gervais. The immediate success and the noisy renown of the Society were due to other things besides the talent of its conductor, who combined with a lively artistic intelligence both common-sense and energy and a remarkable gift for organisation--it was due partly to the help of favourable circumstances, partly to the surfeit of Wagnerism, of which I have just spoken, and partly to the birth of a new religious art, which had sprung up since the death of Cesar Franck round the memory of that great musician.

It is not my intention here to write an appreciation of Cesar Franck's genius, but it is not possible to understand the musical movement in Paris of the last fifteen years if one does not take into account the importance of his teaching. The organ class at the Conservatoire, where in 1872 Franck succeeded his old master Benoist, was for a long time, as M. Vincent d'Indy says, "the true centre for the study of Composition at the Conservatoire. Many of his fellow-workers could never bring themselves to look upon him as one of themselves, because he had the boldness to see in art something other than the means of earning a living. Indeed, Cesar Franck was not of them; and they made him feel this." But the young students made no mistake about the matter. "At this time," M. d'Indy also tells us, "that is to say from 1872 to 1876, the three courses of Advanced Musical Composition were given by three professors who were not at all fitted for their work. One was Victor Masse, a composer of simple light operas and a man with no understanding of a symphony, who was very frequently ill and had to entrust his teaching to one of his pupils; another was Henri Reber, an oldish musician with narrow and dogmatic ideas; and the third was Francois Bazin, who was not capable of distinguishing in his pupil's fugues a false answer from a true one, and whose highest title to glory is derived from a composition called Le Voyage en Chine. So it is not surprising that Cesar Franck's teaching, founded on that of Bach and Beethoven, but admitting, as well, imagination and all new and liberal ideas, did, at that time, draw to him all young minds that had lofty ambitions and that were really in love with their art. And so, quite unconsciously, the master attracted to himself all the sincere and artistic talent that was scattered about the different classes of the Conservatoire, as well as that of his outside pupils."

Among those who received his direct teaching were Henri Duparc, Alexis de Castillon, Vincent d'Indy, Ernest Chausson, Pierre de Breville, Augusta Holmes, Louis de Serres, Charles Bordes, Guy Ropartz, and Guillaume Lekeu. And if to these we add the pupils in the organ classes, who also came under his influence, we have, among others, Samuel Rousseau, Gabriel Pierne, Auguste Chapuis, Paul Vidal, and Georges Marty; and also the virtuosi who were for some time intimate with him, such as Armand Parent and Eugene Ysaye, to whom Franck dedicated his violin sonata. And if one thinks, too, of the artists who, though not his pupils, felt his power--artists such as Gabriel Faure, Alexandre Guilmant, Emmanuel Chabrier, and Paul Dukas--one may see that nearly the whole musical generation of Paris of that time took its inspiration from Cesar Franck. And it was largely with the intention of perpetuating his teaching that his pupils, Charles Bordes and Vincent d'Indy, and his friend, Alexandre Guilmant, founded in 1894, four years after his death, the Schola Cantorum, which has kept his memory alive ever since.

"Our revered father, Franck," said Vincent d'Indy, in a speech, "is in some ways the grandfather of the Schola Cantorum; for it is his system of teaching that we apply and try to carry on here."

The influence of Franck was twofold: it was artistic and moral. On the one hand he was, if I may so put it, an admirable professor of musical architecture; he founded a school of symphony and chamber-music such as France had never had before, which in certain directions was newer and more daring than that of the German symphony writers. And, on the other hand, he exercised by his own character a memorable influence over all those who came into contact with him. His profound faith, that fine, indulgent, and calm faith, shone round him like a glory. The Catholic party, who were awakening to new life in France just then, tried, after his death, to identify his ideals with their own. But this was, as we have said elsewhere, to narrow Franck's mind; for its great charm lay in its harmonious union of religion and liberty, which never limited its artistic sympathies to an exclusive ideal. The composer's son, M. Georges Cesar-Franck, has in vain protested against this monopoly of his father, and says:

"According to certain writers, who wish to reduce everything to a dead level and deduce all things from a single cause, Cesar Franck was a mystic whose true domain was religious music. Nothing could be wider of the mark. The public is given to generalisations, and is too easily gulled. They will judge a composer on a single work, or a group of works, and class him once and for all.... In reality, my father was a man of all-round accomplishments. As a finished musician, he was master of every form of composition. He wrote both religious and secular music--melodies, dances, pastorales, oratorios, symphonic poems, symphonies, sonatas, trios, and operas. He did not confine his attention to any particular kind of work to the exclusion of other kinds; he was able to express himself in any way he chose."

But as what was really religious in him found itself in agreement with a current of thought that was rather powerful at that time, it was inevitable that this one side of his genius should be first brought to light, and that religious music should be the first to benefit by his work. And also one of the early manifestos of the Schola Cantorum dealt with the reform of sacred music by carrying it back to great ancient models; and its first decision was as follows: "Gregorian chant shall rest for all time the fountain-head and the base of the Church's music, and shall constitute the only model by which it may be truly judged."

They added to this, however, music a la Palestrina, and any music that conformed to its principles or was inspired by its example. Such archaic ideas would certainly never create a new kind of religious music, but at least they have helped to restore the old art; and they received their official consecration in the famous letter written by Pope Pius X on the Re-form of Sacred Music.

The achievement of an artistic ideal so restricted as this would not have sufficed, however, to assure the success of the Schola Cantorum, nor establish its authority with a public that was, whatever people may say, only lukewarm in its religion, and that would only interest itself in the religious art of other days as it would in a passing fashion. But the spirit of curiosity and the meaning of modern life began to weigh little by little with the Schola's principles. After singing Palestrinian and Gregorian chants at the Church of Saint-Gervais during Holy Week, they played Carissimi, Schuetz, and the Italian and German masters of the seventeenth century. Then came Bach's cantatas; and their performance, given by M. Bordes in the Salle d'Harcourt, attracted large audiences and started the cult of this master in Paris. Then they sang Rameau and Gluck; and, finally, all ancient music, sacred or secular, was approved. And so this little school, which had been consecrated to the cult of ancient religious music, and had made so modest a beginning, developed into a School of Art capable of satisfying modern wants; and in 1900, when M. Vincent d'Indy became president of the Schola, it was decided to move the school into larger premises in the Rue Saint-Jacques.