MUSICAL COURIER
22
May 25, 1922
MOLIERE—1622-1673
France is celebrating now the three hundredth anniversary of Molière’s birth. This greatest of all French authors of theatrical comedies held up to ridicule the foibles of his day with so much spirit, wit and truth to nature that his plays have kept the stage for more than two centuries. Among his lesser works is a comedy-ballet, or comic opera, called “Le Sicilien,” in which the Turkish slave, Hali, is made to talk some musical nonsense to his master, Adraste, in the manner of musical ignoramuses the world over :
(Enter Musicians.)
H. Here they are. What will they sing?
A. Whatever they think best.
H. They must sing the trio they sang me the other day.
A. No. That’s not what I want.
H. Ah ! Sir, it has a fine natural.
A. What the deuce do you mean with your fine natural?
H. Sir, I hold to the natural. You know I am a good judge. The natural charms me; except in the natural there is no salvation in harmony. Hear a bit of this trio.
A. No. I want something tender, passionate, something to fill me with pleasant fancies.
H. I see very well that you want flats.
The reason why Molière has been neglected for Shakespeare by composers in search of librettos is because Molière wrote nothing but comedies. The average young composer for the stage considers himself capable of bigger things than mere comedy. Gounod, however, tried his hand at a Molière comedy in 1858, one year before he wrote his “Faust.” Whether the lyrical drama arranged by Barbier and Carré from Goethe’s “Faust” and Marlowe’s still earlier “Faustus” is greater than Molière’s “Le Médecin malgré lui” (Mock Doctor) or not is unimportant. The fact remains, however, that Gounod had no comedy in him, and his opera on Molière’s play was barely successful.
In the preface to another comedy-ballet, called “L’Amour Médecin,” Molière says:
“I could wish that this sort of piece should always be presented to you with the ornaments which accompany them at the King’s representations. You would then see them in a much more agreeable form, where the airs and symphonies of the incomparable Lully, with the beauty of the voices, and the skill of the dancers, give them graces which they are sorely in need of.”
. The titles of Molière’s comedy-ballets, in addition to the two already given, are : “Les Fâcheux,” “La Princesse d’Elide,” “M. de Pourgeaugnac,” Les Amants Magnifiques,” “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme,” “Le Malade Imaginaire,” “Psyché.”
Among all these musical comedies the best known is “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme,” which has attracted the attention of many composers during the past two hundred years, including Richard Strauss of our times. In the first scene of the second act M. Jourdain and the musical director talk about the singers and instruments required for the ballet :
M. D. No doubt. You need three voices—a treble, a tenor, and a bass, which will be accompanied by a bass viol, a theorbo and a harpsichord for the figured basses, with two violins to play the symphonies.
M. J. And you must put in a trumpet marine. The trumpet marine is an instrument that pleases me and is so harmonious.
The musical director did not like the suggestion, for the trumpet marine was a sort of one string bass from six to nine feet high, played with a bow. It gave a loud and strident tone which Pepys described in 1667. He said : It do so far outdo a trumpet as nothing more.” It was invented by a man named Marin and was louder than a trumpet. The introduction of such an instrument among the royal personages and the courtiers of Molière’s audiences would have been absurd. The mention of the instrument was enough to reveal the vulgar tastes of the man who tried to pose as a gentleman and a scholar.
In Voltaire’s sketch of Molière’s life occurs the following sentence : “It is noticeable that nearly all those who have made a name in the fine arts have cultivated art in spite of parents, and that nature in them has always been stronger than education.” We quote this sentence, which though written for the Life of Molière is applicable to the lives of many famous musicians. Lully, who wrote the music for at least one of Molière’s comedies, was, like Molière, the son of poor and humble parents, and, like him’ a servant of His Majesty Louis XIV of France.
We regret that our translations of the French originals we have quoted in this article are but plaster casts of the Parian marble. It is a consolation to know, however, that lacking the genius of Molière we are not likely to be hounded to death by our jealous enemies and denied decent burial by our fellow countrymen. It is time that France should make amends for the scurvy treatment of her most brilliant literary son.
few who wish to hear it. It will survive as long as it fits the tastes of enough supporters to make its performance worth while.
The life of a comic opera depends entirely on its public support. Sullivan’s “Mikado” drew large audiences everywhere for years, not because it was a beautifully finished work of art, but because it had certain qualities which fitted the tastes of the public. Several equally artistic works of his were comparatively failures as public attractions.
New piano compositions by Chopin, by Debussy, by Scriabin, were as artistic when the public fought shy of them as they were when the taste of the public gradually accepted them. The fittest of them to survive will be those which the public wishes to hear.
The survival of the fittest, then, is an assured thing. 1 o avoid confusion, however, those who talk about the fittest must define their terms. There is no sense in thinking art while talking public taste. When Herbert Spencer wrote about the sur-vical of the fittest he meant the survival of those creatures who were best adapted to the conditions in which they found themselves. He was not thinking about angels and ideals.
CAMPANOLOGY
On the continent of Europe the art of bell ringing has been developed to an extent which surprises the American traveler when he first hears melodies and chimes played on peals which consist of from thirty to fifty bells. He is accustomed to the powerful tones of a city church bell on a Sunday morning, and he knows the dismal toll of the funeral bell. The brazen clatter of the bells on fire engines and the vociferous din of the rightly named dinner bell, are often the only first hand knowledge he has of bells. He never before heard a bell ringer called an artist.
Probably the greatest bell ringing artist was the Belgian musician, Matthias van den Gheyn. He died in 1785 and with him the highest art of Belgian bell ringing apparently came to an end, for no one has yet been found who can play the bell compositions left by Matthias van den Gheyn. Not only speed, but great strength is required to manipulate the mechanism required to ring the sixty-five bells of Antwerp Cathedral. The famous belfry of Bruges has forty bells. There are forty likewise at Louvain. Mechlin has forty-four bells.
The great epoch of Belgian bell ringing has undoubtedly passed, though there are still more bells rung in Belgium than in any other country in the world.
England now lays claim to the supremacy in bell founding, though English peals at best contain no more than thirteen or fourteen bells. A mathema-tician^stated that twelve bells were capable of ringing 479,001,600 changes, which sum certainly looks generous enough. Nevertheless, twelve bells do not offer much scope for combining several tones at once into harmonies.
Canon Simpson, an English clergyman, is said to have revolutionized the art of tuning bells a few years ago. After long study he discovered that bells, to be in tune, must have five tones at correct intervals, one from the other—that is to say, the fundamental, the octave above the fundamental, the fifth above the first octave, the second octave, the third above the second octave. When these are in tune the bell will have a full, rich, musica( sound, utterly unlike the “moaning and the groaning of the bells, iron bells.”
The difficulty, of course, is to get the bells to yield the correct harmonics. Each manufacturer has his carefully guarded secrets about the proportions of the metals in the mixture. In the mixing of these metals there is far more science than the uninitiated might think. The chief metal, however, is copper. Ninety parts of copper and ten parts of tin make a strong, hard mixture known as bronze. But eighty parts of copper and twenty parts of tin make another kind of metal entirely, which is the extremely sonorous bell metal. Copper and zinc in certain proportions make the familiar yellow brass, which is a very poor substitute for bell metal. But as zinc is cheap and tin exceedingly expensive, bell founders often dilute their tin with a quantity of zinc.
The most famous bell in London is Big Ben in the clock tower of the Westminster Houses of Parliament. It weighs sixteen tons and consists of twenty-two parts of copper and seven parts of tin, melted down twice to make the alloy perfect. The bell, however, is not in tune throughout its series of harmonics and consequently could not be used as a musical instrument. The bells which are of service in peals are mostly small bells. No cathedral tower ׳in existence could support the weight of a dozen Big Bens.
CHEERFUL MUSIC
Whenever we hear old music we get the impression that the composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries must have been cheerful men who were fairly well pleased with their work. Perhaps only the cheerful works have survived. At any rate, it is certain that the bright and joyful dances of our ancestors are more attractive to us and less out of touch with modern tastes than the slow, sad, expressive songs of a bygone age.
It seems as if culture in music had a tendency to make the musician become more and more serious in his tastes. The popular song and dance offend him chiefly because they are so full of thoughtless vitality. They require none of the attention, the concentration of mind, demanded by a symphony. Yet many an old dance survives from times which antedate the already forgotten symphonies of Cherubini, Spohr, and even Raff.
Sonatas, quartets, symphonies, are only highly developed compositions which were originally founded on dance forms.
The marble statues and busts which have remained from the wreck of ancient Athens and Rome are almost always grand or noble or beautiful.
Only enough of the sad or pensive works have been found to show that ancient artists did not delineate only the beautiful. There were sculptors of antiquity who designed the sad and gloomy, strained and tense, works which so many modern sculptors and painters produce. But time has thrown them out and preserved the happy and animated and the beautiful. Whether any of our music is to live for two or more thousand years or not is a question we cannot answer. We venture to assert, however, that the works which will live longest are full of animation, rhythm, concords. Pungent discords unquestionably add a spice to modern music which is certainly lacking in the old masters’ works. A modern composer can hardly write without them. No one of us can escape the influence of the age in which we live. But a change of style may put all our most advanced works hopelessly out of fashion. From among old-fashioned works we believe that posterity will chose those compositions which are joyous, animated, concordant, rather than those which are at present in fashion.
We are not protesting against the modern employment of discord. We are perfectly well aware that inexorable laws of progress, change, experimentation, force composers to follow the impulses of the age. Some modern composers must produce the equivalents of the ancients’ Medusa and Laocoon, but the world prefers to remember Psyche, Venus and Cupid.
Stephen Foster’s melodies, despised as they must have been by the composer’s contemporary symphon-ists and oratorio manufacturers, may yet outline some of the most startling examples of the art now in fashion.
And if the past is any guide to the future, we predict that the compositions of our times which will live longest are the gay and animated works that perhaps seem a little undignified and unimportant beside the most approved and fashionable music of today.
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SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
An eminent musician recently said in our hearing that in music the fittest does not always survive. We are. afraid that Herbert Spencer, who was the author of that famous phrase, would have rapidly demolished the musician’s logic.
Musicians have a way of estimating a work at its art value; but the general public values a work according to its entertaining qualities. The producers of grand opera, for instance, value an opera in proportion to its power of attracting the public into the opera house. The fittest work to survive, from the manager’s point of view, is the work which draws the most money to the coffers of the ticket sellers. Beethoven’s “Fidelio” is probably rated by musicians as a much greater work of art than Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly.” But is it as fit for the taste of the public which has the most money to spend? An opera will survive as long as it fits the tastes of the greatest number.
Now and then a work of great artistic merit happens to fit the public taste. Tschaikowsky’s “Pathetic” symphony, for example, is no less a work of art today than it was twenty-five years ago. It is not played as much now as it used to be simply because the public taste does not demand as much “Pathetic” symphony.
Bach’s B minor mass never had and never will have any great attraction for the general public. It survives because it is one of the greatest musical art works extant, for which there are always a cultured