Zola Describes Classical Musicians
A writer’s summary of accomplished artists, found in various novels, is a helpful resource. One of the more famous one’s is found in Jack Kerouac’s Vanity of Duluoz, which includes, “Melville: ‘I seek that inscrutable thing!’”
The summary that got me thinking just now about such summaries was Émile Zola’s in “The Masterpiece.” Zola has the character Gagniere describe the body of work by 12 composers and puts them in context of the art’s evolution:
“Haydn, rhetorical grace, tinkling music for an ancient lady with powdered hair. . . .
Mozart, the pioneer genius, the first to endow the orchestra with individuality. . . .
Between them, they produced Beethoven; that’s why they’re significant. . . . Beethoven! There’s power, there’s strength through calm, serenity in pain! Michelangelo at the tomb of the Medici! Hero, logician, moulder of human minds, he was all these! The great composers of today all spring from the Choral Symphony…
There goes Weber in the setting of a Romantic landscape, leading the Dance of Death among the weeping willows and the gnarled limbs of oaks. . . .
Next comes Schubert, through the pale beams of the moon along the shores of silvery lakes. . .
And now Rossini, talent in person, gay, unaffected, heedless of expression, snapping his fingers in everybody’s face. Not at all my sort of fellow, of course, but amazing nevertheless for his abundant inventiveness and the tremendous effects he gets out of the accumulation of voices and the fuller orchestration of a repeated theme. . . .
Out of those three you get Meyerbeer. A smart fellow, Meyerbeer, who knew how to make the most of his chances. After Weber, it was he who put the symphony into opera; it was he, too, who gave dramatic expression to the formula unconsciously produced by Rossini. Oh, there are some magnificent things in Meyerbeer, with his feudal pomp and soldierly mysticism! The thrill he imparts to fantastic legends! He’s like a cry of passion echoing through history! On top of that he’s a discoverer: personality of instruments, dramatic recitative with symphonic accompaniment, characteristic phrase acting as keystone to the entire work. . . . Oh, he’s one of the masters, Meyerbeer, one of the really great masters…
Berlioz brought literature into his music. He is the musical illustrator of Shakespeare and Virgil and Goethe. And what a painter! Delacroix in music, with his fine conflagration of sounds, the same clashing contrast of colors! Like all the Romantics, he had his mental kink, of course: religion, and a tendency to let himself be swept away into a lot of high-flown ecstasies. No sense of construction in opera, but marvelous in his orchestral work, though he does tend to torture his orchestra by over-emphasizing the personality of every instrument. He actually thought of them as real people, you know. I always get a delightful thrill out of what he said about clarinets: ‘Clarinets are women beloved’, he said. . . .
Then there’s Chopin, such a dandy, and so Byronic, the poet of the mind diseased!
Mendelssohn, now, is like a faultless engraver, Shakespeare in dancing-pumps, and his ‘Songs Without Words’ are jewels for intelligent women! . . . What comes after can be spoken of only on bended knee. . . .”
“Oh, Schumann! Despair and pleasure in despair. The end of all things, one last, pure, melancholy song, soaring above the ruins of the world! . ..
Oh, Wagner! The god, the incarnation of centuries of music! His work, the mighty firmament, where all the arts are blended into one, characters portrayed in all their true humanity, and the orchestra itself lives through every phase of the acted drama. Think what a massacre of conventions, what wholesale destruction of ineffectual theories it stands for, the revolution, the breaking-down of barriers to infinity! . . . The overture to Tannhäuser, what is it but the mighty hallelujah of the new century! First, the pilgrims’ chorus, the calm, slow beat of the profound religious motif, gradually giving place to the Sirens’ song, the voluptuous pleasures of Venus, their rapturous delights and fascinating languors imposing themselves more and more, to the point of complete abandon; then, little by little, the sacred theme comes back, takes all the other themes and welds them into one supreme harmony and carries them away on the wings of a great triumphal anthem!”
