236 MUSIC 



MUSIC 1 



The more recent developments of music have been concerned with performance 

 rather than creation and invention. The truth is that, with the death of Wagner, 

 an end came to a long period of inventive development in the art the period, in fact, 

 of developed music which may be said to have begun with Bach and ended with Wagner 

 and Brahms. It is probable that to future historians this period will be known as the 

 " equal temperament period," in which music was universally written on the basis of 

 the whole-toned scale. The general tendency of music of the post-Wagner period has 

 been to search for some new scale or tonal basis and consequently to express this in terms 

 which at first seemed strange to ears trained to the old scak. With Wagner a certain 

 period of composition may be said to have ended, and a new period of performance and 

 interpretation to have begun; and it is that period which, in its turn, seems to have come 

 to its own development and close in the last year or two probably to give birth, in its 

 turn, to a new period of original composition. 



Whether this turn out to be true or not the expectation of it seems to be logical. A 

 long and fertile period of creative production means almost certainly that less time and 

 care can be devoted to interpretation and performance; there are more works claiming 

 a hearing than can easily be heard; and musicians are more engaged in the business of 

 presenting the new works than in perfecting their renderings of the old. In time, there- 

 fore, the actual technique of interpretation falls short of the demands made upon it; 

 attention is drawn to it; and with the pause in the tide of production comes greater leis- 

 ure to study the technique of performance and the consequent development in that 

 branch of the art. The link between two such periods is curiously represented in the 

 person of Wagner, who found that existing means of interpretation were not sufficient 

 for the adequate performance of his own works, and he had therefore to evolve for him- 

 self a new orchestral technique by means of which his scores could be made intelligible 

 to the world. He may be said to have invented the modern art of conducting an art 

 which arose entirely from his own works. Wagner had by long and patient study of 

 Beethoven, Mozart and Weber, arrived at the conclusion that the orchestral works of 

 the great masters had hardly ever been properly heard, and his essay on conducting 

 marked an epoch in the history of music. But when his own scores came to be exam- 

 ined, they were pro.iounced unplayable. By the old methods, moreover, they were 

 unplayable, and ghastly indeed must have been some of the performances of opera 

 orchestras in Germany at their first rehearsal of his scores. No amount of merely beat- 

 ing one, two, three, four in a bar could produce melody and harmony out of the chaos 

 presented by the score. The thing seemed hopeless. Like every creator or originator, 

 Wagner had to begin at the beginning and form the tools with which his work was to be 

 done. Liszt and von Biilow, the greatest contemporary masters of the technique of 

 the pianoforte, were the first to realise that there was at least a possibility of the per- 

 formance of Wagner's works; they had learned from him how to conduct Beethoven, 

 and the knowledge thus gained was applied to the interpretation of his own scores. And 

 after them he trained a whole band of disciples in the interpretation of his operas 

 Richter, Seidl, Levi, Richard Strauss, Mottl, Weingartner, and Nikisch were the chief 

 of them; all these became great exponents of the new art of conducting. These men had 

 many varieties of quality and talent, but it will be seen that one thing was common to 

 the equipment of all of them: they were all trained in the interpretation of one set of 

 works Wagner's own operas. And that fact gives us the key to the new art of con- 

 ducting as compared with the old art of beating time; for they had these scores absolute- 

 ly in their heads. They lived with them; their lives were spent in rehearsing and copy- 

 ing and drilling until every note was as much their own as if they had themselves com- 

 posed the score; thus when they came to conduct they were not merely reading the music 

 of the printed page a bar in advance of the orchestra; they were leading the orchestra in 

 something that was within themselves, something that came from their own inner being. 



\See E. B. xix, 72 et. seq.; and articles enumerated on p. 885 of Index Volume. 



