Next up on the essays shelf:
A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing
After reading all of the essays that come before, it is a shock (and a pleasure) to come across the section entitled “Music”, where Mencken discusses the classical composers who seem to him most interesting. Well, and the ones he is in awe of, as well. While Mencken never loses his critical facility, and can still sense things he doesn’t think quite great about this or that composer, his admiration far outweighs his criticisms. And when it comes to Beethoven, Mencken can’t hold himself back. I love hearing him praise like this. It’s exciting. It’s not that I don’t think Beethoven deserves it, it’s just an entirely different tone, and it suits Mencken just as well as the Crankypants Curmudgeon.
Beethoven is a constant reference point for Mencken and comes up in every other essay. He is the Gold Standard as an artist, he is the Gold Standard of integrity. (Clifford Odets’ journal, The Time is Ripe, is as much a contemplation of Beethoven, and how Beethoven spurs Odets on in his own work, as it is a description of the rehearsal process for Night Music, the last Group Theatre production. You can peruse some excerpts here.) Mencken yearns towards Beethoven in his mind, he stands in awe of the music, and not just that – but the character of the man himself. That is one of the points he addresses in this essay about Beethoven. Mencken feels that the music is better than Beethoven’s contemporaries and rivals – not because of the music so much as because he was a superior sort of man. Beethoven’s concerns were big and universal, whereas other composers’ concerns were domestic and trivial. And so their music may be beautiful or soothing but they can never reach the thunderous questioning heights that Beethoven’s did, because they aren’t asking the same big questions.
In this essay he keeps coming back to the Eroica, and how far and beyond that piece of music is from anything else going on at the time, and at any time, really.
But Mencken can say it all better. This is just an excerpt of a larger essay. I am glad to see that people are buying the Chrestomathy from my links! It’s a great book to have lying around.
A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing
What ails the music of the Tschaikowskys, Mendelssohns – and Chopins? What ails it is that it is the music of shallow men. It is often, in its way, lovely. It bristles with charming musical ideas. It is infinitely ingenious and workmanlike. But it is as hollow, at bottom, as a bull by an archbishop. It is the music of second-rate men.
Beethoven disdained all their artifices: he didn’t need them. It would be hard to think of a composer, even of the fourth rate, who worked with thematic material of less intrinsic merit. He borrowed tunes wherever he found them; he made them up out of snatches of country jigs; when he lacked one altogether he contented himself with a simple phrase, a few banal notes. All such things he viewed simply as raw materials; his interest was concentrated upon their use. To that use of them he brought the appalling powers of his unrivaled genius. His ingenuity began where that of other men left off. His most complicated structures retained the overwhelming clarity of the Parthenon. And into them he got a kind of feeling that even the Greeks could not match; he was preeminently a modern man, with all trace of the barbarism vanished. Into his gorgeous music there went all of the high skepticism that was of the essence of the Eighteenth Century, but into it there also went the new enthusiasm, the new determination to challenge and beat the gods, that dawned with the Nineteenth.
The older I grow, the more I am convinced that the most portentous phenomenon in the whole history of music was the first public performance of the Eroica on April 7, 1805. The manufacturers of program me notes have swathed that gigantic work in so many layers of banal legend and speculation that its intrinsic merits have been almost forgotten. Was it dedicated to Napoleon? If so, was the dedication sincere or ironical? Who cares – that is, who with ears? It might have been dedicated, just as well, to Louis XIV, Paracelsus or Pontius Pilate. What makes it worth discussing, today and forever, is the fact that on its very first page Beethoven threw his hat into the ring and laid his claim to immortality. Bang! – and he is off. No compromise! No easy bridge from the past! The Second Symphony is already miles behind. A new order of music has been born. The very manner of it is full of challenge. There is no sneaking into the foul business by way of a mellifluous and disarming introduction; no preparatory hemming and hawing to cajole the audience and enable the conductor to find his place in the score. Nay! Out of silence comes the angry crash of the tonic triad, and then at once, with no pause, the first statement of the first subject – grim, domineering, harsh, raucous, and yet curiously lovely – with its astounding collision with that electrical C sharp. The carnage has begun early; we are only in the seventh measure. In the thirteenth and fourteenth comes the incomparable roll down the simple scale of E flat – and what follows is all that has ever been said, perhaps all that ever will be said, about music-making in the grand manner. What was afterward done, even by Beethoven, was done in the light of that perfect example. Every line of modern music that is honestly music bears some sort of relation to that epoch-making first movement.
OK, I’ve been enjoying the Mencken excerpts, and even chimed in about a couple. But I do think he goes off the deep end a bit here. Admittedly I’m a musician and bring my own biases (but also my own specialized knowledge?) to this.
Not in the praise of Beethoven, goodness knows — he’s absolutely a giant above all of us. But in the concurrent slamming of Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn, Chopin… first of all, I’m never a fan of the “if X is to be good, Y and Z must be lousy” procedure. But also, they’re giants as well (maybe Mendelssohn a bit less, though I still like him a lot). As I see it, Mencken is a prisoner of the fashionable worldview of his era here, much as he would resist such an idea and insist on his debunking of what was fashionable. But at that time, the German-tradition symphonists like L van B (and the quasi-symphonic opera composing of Wagner) were the “right” kind of music to like among intellectuals, and the other three listed were “salon” or “ballet” composers, inherently less important or valuable. I’m glad we’ve moved away from that toward a more inclusive appreciation of what masters of different areas have to offer.
But HLM remains an interesting read always, even if (or, especially because) in this case he himself is part of the history of cultural appreciation that he’s presenting. I enjoyed the chance to read this and think about it.
Rinaldo – fascinating! I don’t know much about classical music and the trends of different eras, so thanks so much for all this.
You say: // But at that time, the German-tradition symphonists like L van B (and the quasi-symphonic opera composing of Wagner) were the “right” kind of music to like among intellectuals, and the other three listed were “salon” or “ballet” composers, inherently less important or valuable. //
I know this is a huge question, but can you explain why that might be? What was going on at the time to make those guys be “in”, and the other guys seen as “lesser”? I mean, we are coming into the Modern Era, post Rite of Spring – am I way off in thinking that that might have had something to do with it? I honestly don’t know and would love to hear your perspective.
And I think Mencken would count it a lost essay that didn’t make SOMEone reading it pissed off and go, “Now, hang on a minute there …!!”
:)
I have really enjoyed your comments on my site thus far – you’re new here, I believe, yes? I really appreciate it!
And I look forward to hearing more from you in re: the composer essays. I think I’ll excerpt from Mencken’s essay about Brahms tomorrow.
Or is it that “ballet” composers are too popular with regular folk, and therefore somehow suspect? You know, everyone can hum along to the Nutcracker and so that must mean it is somehow not as good?
We still have that attitude with us today!
Just curious to hear more about all this. Thanks!
Heh heh I’m with Rinaldo on this. I have to say I’ve never heard of Chopin referred to as shallow. To me it’s not much different than the bands we preferred in high school. We all loved all the music but I was a Stones guy, Paul was a Beatles guy, Luke was a Who guy etc… When we get older and get exposed to other music we pick our favorites too…now I’m a Bach guy, my friend is a Mozart girl, and I Guess HLM is a Beethoven guy.
Sheila, I’ve been following your blog for a year or two (I first stumbled on it through some of your comments about acting — maybe the one about “Streetcar”), but haven’t commented before, I guess — mostly figured I didn’t have anything distinctive to say. But I guess the last day or two I did think so. Thanks for taking my comment so kindly: while I was working (teaching) this afternoon I kept worrying that I had come off snotty or dismissive, or like one of those readers whose only way of dealing with this kind of writing is to agree/disagree and nothing more (you talked about that). That wasn’t what moved me to write; it was more a kind of wry recognition that even the writers who are determined to combat the commonplace attitudes of their time can still be prisoners of it themselves, in a way.
OK, your question. It’s hard to be definite about historic cultural attitudes, because obviously there were really a lot of different ones going on at the same time, as always. But forcing myself to go ahead and make a few generalizations: I think Stravinsky, even if respected (by some) was seen as off to the side, as was Debussy. The former was writing ballets (like Rite of Spring); the latter, ballets and evocative tone poems like The Sea and Afternoon of a Faun. But to the orthodox minds (and Mencken seems to be one of them here, however much he might protest such a characterization), the German symphonic tradition (which could include piano sonatas and string quartets too, all written in similar formats) like Beethoven and Brahms was the “real” direction of music history: that’s where the true serious music was seen to be.
Other music might be delightful but was seen as evading the “real” challenge of serious music, writing types of music that use short self-contained forms: Tchaikovsky in ballet (which comprises a series of short “numbers” like the Sugar Plum Fairy), Mendelssohn in short piano pieces and songs and oratorios, Chopin in short piano pieces (modeled on dances like waltzes and mazurkas, or nocturnes etc.). I’ve even seen the term “effeminate” used in that period (can’t remember exactly where, sorry) for those three composers — not as code for orientation (the latter two composers were in fact heterosexual) but implying that they evaded the “real” challenge of music — the “manly”pursuit, silly as it now seems to describe it that way.
Anyway, since then a more pluralistic attitude toward music analysis and history has become accepted, to everyone’s benefit I think. For just one example, Charles Rosen in his The Romantic Generation called Chopin “the greatest contrapuntalist since Bach,” which I think makes sense but would have surprised the musicologists in Mencken’s day, when Chopin was a creator of lovely but shallow pianistic miniatures.
That’s how I see it anyway. Thanks for the welcoming response.
Yikes, I do go on, don’t I. It’s hard to answer a complex question like that briefly, but I should’ve tried a little harder!
No, you didn’t go on and on – that was extremely informative. Thank you! I can understand what you are saying, especially in terms of “manly” and “effeminate” – I think some of that goes on in the literary world today (and always, probably). There are the big “manly” serious books that take on Important Topics (which, of course, are seen as inherently male) – and then there are the popular books, genre books – or books written by women which are somehow relegated to “special interest” books – with very few exceptions (you could list them on one hand: Annie Proulx, AS Byatt, Hilary Mantel …)
It all is rather silly, but the attitudes persist. I know I use Don DeLillo as my punching bag but he’s an easy target with a gigantic over-written book such as Underworld which was praised as being super-important, the Best Book of Our Times, etc. Bull shit. It was a mess. He was treated kindly because of his reputation. I am so glad that Hilary Mantel is currently dominating the literary world right now, in terms of prizes and success. Now her books about Henry VIII really ARE “important”.
Anyway, this is a digression. It is so interesting how attitudes change – and also how critics want to somehow align themselves on the “right” side. You don’t want to go down in history as the person who dissed what would become a classic. Like the critic for the NY Times who dismissed Sgt. Pepper as a stupid silly album. Of course one is allowed to have one’s own opinion about things …
The whole conversation about critics and acceptance of different kinds of music (or literature, or art, or whatever) is so interesting to me. And I think you’re right, that a more inclusionary attitude is best when it comes to art. People will always be afraid of or even affronted by “the new” – we can’t seem to help it.
Thanks again, Rinaldo – this has been really interesting.
My friend Linda Holmes has written about that phenomenon in present-day literature in her pop-culture NPR blog “Monkey See.” (And she writes about other good stuff there too.)
Here’s one such article: “Women Are Not Marshmallow Peeps, And Other Reasons There’s No ‘Chick Lit’.”
I love Linda Holmes!! I follow her on Twitter and read everything she writers. She’s awesome – thanks for the link!
Wow…music of “lesser” men seems a bizarrely strong statement to make, but as noted, Beethoven does stand at the beginning of the Germanic symphonic tradition as it came to be known during the Romantic era. Beethoven’s enormous shadow looms large over everything, through Schumann, Brahms, Bruckner, all the way to Mahler (beyond whom things get a lot different, as Romanticism came to an end along with tonality). Beethoven also looms in the world of dramatic music, but a bit less so — it’s hard to cast that big a shadow over a man like Wagner, who pretty much spent his entire life establishing one of the largest shadows in the history of Western art.
But I, too, am glad to live in an era when the idea of Chopin, for example, as a “lesser man” is not to be taken very seriously. Chopin wrote a great deal of tremendously profound music, and he frankly did things with the textures of the piano that Beethoven could only dream of.
Mencken’s right about the effect the Eroica had on the musical world, though — before it, the symphony as a form was pretty much firmly established, and then along comes this guy Beethoven with his Third Symphony that’s twice as long as the accepted symphonies of the day, that places unusual demands on the listener’s ability to follow the sonata-allegro form a fifteen-minute first movement, and that funeral march in the second. The scherzo had to be shocking to ears accustomed to a pleasant minuet in the third movement. I’d love to be able to time travel to this work’s first performance, and see what those audiences thought of it.
For me, though, Beethoven’s gifts reached their absolute and glorious height in the Seventh…now there is a musical work that stands among the very greatest artistic achievements of our species!
(For a reading recommendation, as if you really needed one, there’s a wonderful chapter on Beethoven in Leonard Bernstein’s book The Joy of Music. I can’t recommend that book highly enough!)
Beautiful, Jaquondor – thank you so much for all of that.
Yes, where is our time machine??
What is the story behind Beethoven’s writing of the Eroica? Where was he at at that point in his life?
I’ll certainly second that recommendation! And also that awe at the Eroica (and the 5th, and 7th, and 9th symphonies). I’ll study them all my lives and never get to the bottom of them, yet they reach the first-time listener as well.
Amazing.