Jean-Christophe In Paris — THE MARKET-PLACE, I, part 4
A few days after Théophile Goujart hunted Christophe up in his lair.
He did not seem to mind his being in such a horrible place.
On the contrary, he was charming.
He said: "I thought perhaps you would like to hear a little music from time to time: and as I have tickets for everything, I came to ask if you would care to come with me."
Christophe was delighted.
He was glad of the kindly attention, and thanked him effusively.
Goujart was a different man from what he had been at their first meeting.
He had dropped his conceit, and, man to man, he was timid, docile, anxious to learn.
It was only when they were with others that he resumed his superior manner and his blatant tone of voice.
His eagerness to learn had a practical side to it.
He had no curiosity about anything that was not actual.
He wanted to know what Christophe thought of a score he had received which he would have been hard put to it to write about, for he could hardly read a note.
They went to a symphony concert.
They had to go in by the entrance to a music-hall.
They went down a winding passage to an ill-ventilated hall: the air was stifling: the seats were very narrow, and placed too close together: part of the audience was standing and blocking up every way out:--the uncomfortable French.
A man who looked as though he were hopelessly bored was racing through a Beethoven symphony as though he were in a hurry to get to the end of it.
The voluptuous strains of a stomach-dance coming from the music-hall next door were mingled with the funeral march of the _Eroica_.
People kept coming in and taking their seats, and turning their glasses on the audience.
As soon as the last person had arrived, they began to go out again.
Christophe strained every nerve to try and follow the thread of the symphony through the babel;
and he did manage to wrest some pleasure from it--(for the orchestra was skilful, and Christophe had been deprived of symphony music for a long time)--and then Goujart took his arm and, in the middle of the concert, said: "Now let us go.
We'll go to another concert."
Christophe frowned: but he made no reply and followed his guide.
They went half across Paris, and then reached another hall, that smelled of stables, in which at other times fairy plays and popular pieces were given--(in Paris music is like those poor workingmen who share a lodging: when one of them leaves the bed, the other creeps into the warm sheets).
No air, of course: since the reign of Louis XIV the French have considered air unhealthy: and the ventilation of the theaters, like that of old at Versailles, makes it impossible for people to breathe.
A noble old man, waving his arms like a lion-tamer, was letting loose an act of Wagner: the wretched beast--the act--was like the lions of a menagerie, dazzled and cowed by the footlights, so that they have to be whipped to be reminded that they are lions.
The audience consisted of female Pharisees and foolish women, smiling inanely.
After the lion had gone through its performance, and the tamer had bowed, and they had both been rewarded by the applause of the audience, Goujart suggested that they should go to yet another concert.
But this time Christophe gripped the arms of his stall, and declared that he would not budge: he had had enough of running from concert to concert, picking up the crumbs of a symphony and scraps of a concert on the way.
In vain did Goujart try to explain to him that musical criticism in Paris was a trade in which it was more important to see than to hear.
Christophe protested that music was not written to be heard in a cab, and needed more concentration.
Such a hotch-potch of concerts was sickening to him: one at a time was enough for him.
He was much surprised at the extraordinary number of concerts in Paris.
Like most Germans, he thought that music held a subordinate place in France: and he expected that it would be served up in small delicate portions.
By way of a beginning, he was given fifteen concerts in seven days.
There was one for every evening in the week, and often two or three an evening at the same time in different quarters of the city.
On Sundays there were four, all at the same time.
Christophe marveled at this appetite for music.
And he was no less amazed at the length of the programs.
Till then he had thought that his fellow-countrymen had a monopoly of these orgies of sound which had more than once disgusted him in Germany.
He saw now that the Parisians could have given them points in the matter of gluttony.
They were given full measure: two symphonies, a concerto, one or two overtures, an act from an opera.
And they came from all sources: German, Russian, Scandinavian, French--beer, champagne, orgeat, wine--they gulped down everything without winking.
Christophe was amazed that these indolent Parisians should have had such capacious stomachs.
They did not suffer for it at all.
It was the cask of the Danaïdes.
It held nothing.
It was not long before Christophe perceived that this mass of music amounted to very little really.
He saw the same faces and heard the same pieces at every concert.
Their copious programs moved in a circle.
Practically nothing earlier than Beethoven.
Practically nothing later than Wagner.
And what gaps between them!
It seemed as though music were reduced to five or six great German names, three or four French names, and, since the Franco-Russian alliance, half a dozen Muscovites.
None of the old French Masters.
None of the great Italians.
None of the German giants of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
No contemporary German music, with the single exception of Richard Strauss, who was more acute than the rest, and came once a year to plant his new works on the Parisian public.
No Belgian music.
No Tschek music.
But, most surprising of all, practically no contemporary French music.
And yet everybody was talking about it mysteriously as a thing that would revolutionize the world.
Christophe was yearning for an opportunity of hearing it: he was very curious about it, and absolutely without prejudice: he was longing to hear new music, and to admire the works of genius.
But he never succeeded in hearing any of it: for he did not count a few short pieces, quite cleverly written, but cold and brain-spun, to which he had not listened very attentively.
* * * * * While he was waiting to form an opinion, Christophe tried to find out something about it from musical criticism.
That was not easy.
It was like the Court of King Pétaud.
Not only did the various papers lightly contradict each other: but they contradicted themselves in different articles--almost on different pages.
To read them all was enough to drive a man crazy.
Fortunately, the critics only read their own articles, and the public did not read any of them.
But Christophe, who wanted to gain a clear idea about French musicians, labored hard to omit nothing: and he marveled at the agility of the critics, who darted about in a sea of contradictions like fish in water.
But amid all these divergent opinions one thing struck him: the pedantic manner of most of the critics.
Who was it said that the French were amiable fantastics who believed in nothing?
Those whom Christophe saw were more hag-ridden by the science of music--even when they knew nothing--than all the critics on the other side of the Rhine.
At that time the French musical critics had set about learning what music was.
There were even a few who knew something about it: they were men of original thought, who had taken the trouble to think about their art, and to think for themselves.
Naturally, they were not very well known: they were shelved in their little reviews: with only one or two exceptions, the newspapers were not for them.
They were honest men--intelligent, interesting, sometimes driven by their isolation to paradox and the habit of thinking aloud, intolerance, and garrulity.
The rest had hastily learned the rudiments of harmony: and they stood gaping in wonder at their newly acquired knowledge.
Like Monsieur Jourdain when he learned the rules of grammar, they marvelled at their knowledge: "_D, a, Da; F, a, Fa; R, a, Ra....
Ah!
How fine it is!...
Ah!
How splendid it is to know something!...
_" They only babbled of theme and counter-theme, of harmonies and resultant sounds, of consecutive ninths and tierce major.
When they had labeled the succeeding harmonies which made up a page of music, they proudly mopped their brows: they thought they had explained the music, and almost believed that they had written it.
As a matter of fact, they had only repeated it in school language, like a boy making a grammatical analysis of a page of Cicero.
But it was so difficult for the best of them to conceive music as a natural language of the soul that, when they did not make it an adjunct to painting, they dragged it into the outskirts of science, and reduced it to the level of a problem in harmonic construction.
Some who were learned enough took upon themselves to show a thing or two to past musicians.
They found fault with Beethoven, and rapped Wagner over the knuckles.
They laughed openly at Berlioz and Gluck.
Nothing existed for them just then but Johann Sebastian Bach, and Claude Debussy.
And Bach, who had lately been roundly abused, was beginning to seem pedantic, a periwig, and in fine, a hack.
Quite distinguished men extolled Rameau in mysterious terms--Rameau and Couperin, called the Great.
There were tremendous conflicts waged between these learned men.
They were all musicians: but as they all affected different styles, each of them claimed that his was the only true style, and cried "Raca!"
to that of their colleagues.
They accused each other of sham writing and sham culture, and hurled at each other's heads the words "idealism" and "materialism," "symbolism" and "verism," "subjectivism" and "objectivism."
Christophe thought it was hardly worth while leaving Germany to find the squabbles of the Germans in Paris.
Instead of being grateful for having good music presented in so many different fashions, they would only tolerate their own particular fashion: and a new _Lutrin_, a fierce war, divided musicians into two hostile camps, the camp of counterpoint and the camp of harmony.
Like the _Gros-boutiens_ and the _Petits-boutiens_, one side maintained with acrimony that music should be read horizontally, and the other that it should be read vertically.
One party would only hear of full-sounding chords, melting concatenations, succulent harmonies: they spoke of music as though it were a confectioner's shop.
The other party would not hear of the ear, that trumpery organ, being considered: music was for them a lecture, a Parliamentary assembly, in which all the orators spoke at once without bothering about their neighbors, and went on talking until they had done: if people could not hear, so much the worse for them!
They could read their speeches next day in the _Official Journal_: music was made to be read, and not to be heard.
When Christophe first heard of this quarrel between the _Horizontalists_ and the _Verticalists_, he thought they were all mad.
When he was summoned to join in the fight between the army of _Succession_ and the army of _Superposition_, he replied, with his usual formula, which was very different from that of Sosia: "Gentlemen, I am everybody's enemy."
And when they insisted, saying: "Which matters most in music, harmony or counterpoint?"
He replied: "Music.
Show me what you have done."
They were all agreed about their own music.
These intrepid warriors who, when they were not pummeling each other, were whacking away at some dead Master whose fame had endured too long, were reconciled by the one passion which was common to them all: an ardent musical patriotism.
France was to them _the_ great musical nation.
They were perpetually proclaiming the decay of Germany.
That did not hurt Christophe.
He had declared so himself, and therefore was not in a position to contradict them.
But he was a little surprised to hear of the supremacy of French music: there was, in fact, very little trace of it in the past.
And yet French musicians maintained that their art had been admirable from the earliest period.
By way of glorifying French music, they set to work to throw ridicule on the famous men of the last century, with the exception of one Master, who was very good and very pure--and a Belgian.
Having done that amount of slaughter, they were free to admire the archaic Masters, who had been forgotten, while a certain number of them were absolutely unknown.
Unlike the lay schools of France which date the world from the French Revolution, the musicians regarded it as a chain of mighty mountains, to be scaled before it could be possible to look back on the Golden Age of music, the Eldorado of art.
After a long eclipse the Golden Age was to emerge again: the hard wall was to crumble away: a magician of sound was to call forth in full flower a marvelous spring: the old tree of music was to put forth young green leaves: in the bed of harmony thousands of flowers were to open their smiling eyes upon the new dawn: and silvery trickling springs were to bubble forth with the vernal sweet song of streams--a very idyl.
Christophe was delighted.
But when he looked at the bills of the Parisian theaters, he saw the names of Meyerbeer, Gounod, Massenet, and Mascagni and Leoncavallo--names with which he was only too familiar: and he asked his friends if all this brazen music, with its girlish rapture, its artificial flowers, like nothing so much as a perfumery shop, was the garden of Armide that they had promised him.
They were hurt and protested: if they were to be believed, these things were the last vestiges of a moribund age: no one attached any value to them.
But the fact remained that _Cavalleria Rusticana_ flourished at the Opéra Comique, and _Pagliacci_ at the Opéra: Massenet and Gounod were more frequently performed than anybody else, and the musical trinity--_Mignon_, _Les Huguenots_, and _Faust_--had safely crossed the bar of the thousandth performance.
But these were only trivial accidents: there was no need to go and see them.
When some untoward fact upsets a theory, nothing is more simple than to ignore it.
The French critics shut their eyes to these blatant works and to the public which applauded them: and only a very little more was needed to make them ignore the whole music-theater in France.
The music-theater was to them a literary form, and therefore impure.
(Being all literary men, they set a ban on literature.
) Any music that was expressive, descriptive, suggestive--in short, any music with any meaning--was condemned as impure.
In every Frenchman there is a Robespierre.
He must be for ever chopping the head off something or somebody to purify it.
The great French critics only recognized pure music: the rest they left to the rabble.
Christophe was rather mortified when he thought how vulgar his taste must be.
But he found some comfort in the discovery that all these musicians who despised the theater spent their time in writing for it: there was not one of them who did not compose operas.
But no doubt that was also a trivial accident.
They were to be judged, as they desired, by their pure music.
Christophe looked about for their pure music.
