H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/February 9, 1916

Chance phrases, like chance shots, have a way of doing astounding and immeasurable execution. Nietzsche almost destroyed Zola in Germany, where the young freebooters of letters were all whooping him up, by calling him “the delight to stink.” He did the business of the polyandrous Mme. Dudevant with another and worse label: “the milch cow with a grand manner.” In the same way (though innocently, and even affectionately) Hans von Bülow dealt Antonin Dvórák a fearful blow by calling him “der Bauer im Frack”—the peasant in a dresscoat. The four words have haunted the poor Bohemian tone-poet ever since: they roll forever from the pens of rubber-stamp critics; they are the foundation of the insane notion that the E minor symphony is hollow and shoddy music; they have helped to make the fame of Tschaikowsky by hamstringing one who was actually his superior (as a sober and prayerful comparison of the New World symphony with the Pathétique will quickly show). . . .

Beethoven himself gave his Eighth symphony the black eye which it still wears today. In writing to Salomon, the London Hammerstein of a century ago, he spoke of it as “eine kleine sinfonie in F”—a little symphony in F. The phrase still lives, as healthy and as horrible as a wart. Little is translated as puny, trivial, empty, inconsiderable, jejune, meagre, trifling, slight, paltry, insignificant. The work is grouped with the Second, sometimes even with the First. It was the last of the nine to cross the frontiers of Germany, and even at home, as the learned Hanslick tells us, it was for long so little-known that the phrase, “the symphony in F,” was commonly applied to the Pastoral, as if none other in F existed. . . . No doubt Herr Strube will help along this ancient prejudice (though surely unwillingly) by performing it at the first concert of his revolutionary chautauqua course at the Lyric. . . .

§2.

But what is thus so modest and ingratiating, so appetizing and digestible, is really anything but a dish for musical sucklings. On the contrary, its superficial simplicity is but a mask for some of the boldest and most ingenious writing that even Beethoven ever did. One needs proceed no further than the first movement to see how deceptive a suave and luscious tune may be. Here are no less than three of them, each as soft and glistening as glycerin, and they roll out of the orchestra with all the naiveté of folk-song. The first, leaping from the strings, is gay, bouncing, thrilling; the second, as it were, tickles the ribs; the third, dropping from the higher wind to the violas and cellos, is of a drowsy and voluptuous beauty. But presently comes the double bar, and then——!

Well, and then comes a profound demonstration of what music may mean in the hands of a great genius. The mood suddenly changes from geniality to seriousness, from seriousness to disquiet, from disquiet to discontent, and from discontent to downright wrath. The same six notes (embracing, in their first form, the three tones of the tonic triad and the leading tone), which were a moment ago so artless and caressing, now become sinister and disturbing. The key of F is forgotten; we are in the stark key of C major, and after a few measures the orchestra delivers an angry blast upon its tonic triad. Two more such blasts and we are in D minor, and the formal development has begun. That development is no less remarkable for its overwhelming violence and fury than for the austere simplicity of its materials. Almost every note of it comes from the little phrase of four tones. “There is hardly a bar,” says Sir George Grove, “without it; now in the first part of the bar, now in the last; now low down; now high up.” Here, indeed, Beethoven offers a truly staggering display of his virtuosity—a display comparable to that in the first movement of the Fifth symphony. It is as if he were deliberately trying to show how vast and tumultuous are the emotions that can be squeezed out of a single phrase, and that a very short one, and as empty of passion, inherently, as a bird call. Nothing could more impressively demonstrate the endless resourcefulness of the man. In the 131 measures which precede the re-entrance of the second subject he uses the phrase, with but little change, no less than 65 times, and yet there is no more effect of monotony in this working out than in, say, the last movement of the Fifth.

§3.

By comparison with this memorable first movement, the rest of the Eighth symphony, even including the last movement, suffers as musical literature, but in the concert hall it will probably always have to yield to the Allegretto scherzando, that incomparable piece of foolery. Here we have Beethoven in the mood which Shakespeare knew when he created Dogberry and Sir Toby Belch. He is not merely waggish, but downright buffoonish and Rabelaisian. From the first entrance of the double-basses in the third measure the thing is an elephantine jocosity, and as amusing as it is ingenious. One needs scarcely to be told that it had its birth at the beer table: there is a constant flapping of seidel lids and poking of ribs. Nor is it surprising to hear that it was written at a time when the circumstances of the composer’s life were anything but gay. (He was trying to rescue his brother Johann from a foolish marriage with a designing working girl, and even called in the police to help him.) Such a man as Beethoven is always at least double-barreled. He has, as it were, more than one cylinder. When the clouds gather about him he can find escape in his own homeric laughter. His attitude toward the world, and even toward himself as a citizen of it is inevitably somewhat remote and dispassionate. Beethoven was surely no Werther. We know with what half-pitying amusement he viewed the folks about him, particularly when they were most serious, and we may well suspect that he had something of the same olympian contempt for his own private combats and malaises. No doubt he kept his three famous love letters to Theresa von Braunschweig, not to moon over them, but to snicker at them.

§4.

Over the minuet of the Eighth symphony, or, to be more accurate, over its tempo, critical feuds have been waged for years, and in his incomparable program notes for the Boston Symphony concerts Philip Hale gives the pros and cons of the matter at great length. Should it be played slowly, as the minuet used to be danced, or briskly, as is usually done? Wagner, in his “Ueber das Dirigen,” declared for a very slow tempo, and grounded his argument on the theory that the Allegretto scherzando is really the scherzo of the symphony, and that the minuet (which is not specifically called a minuet, but merely marked Tempo di minuetto) should be regarded as the andante. This ancient dispute, however, need not detain the mere music-lover. The thing is worth hearing played either way, but its merit is not sufficient to justify a row over it. Many far better minuets are to be found in musical literature—for example, the one in Mozart’s Jupiter. Beethoven himself, indeed wrote better ones, and with much less apparent effort. (That in D major, so beloved of amateurs, at once suggests itself.) If you are interested in the question consult Grove’s book on the Beethoven symphonies. He shows, among other things, that the well-known horn duet in the trio was originally a duet for flutes, written in 1792, and that, moreover, it probably differs as we now know it from the form approved by Beethoven himself.

§5.

Grove calls the last movement “the greatest portion of this great symphony . . . . larger in dimensions and loftier in spirit than either of the preceding movements,” but here, it is probable, a good many students of the work will dissent from his judgment. He seems to be chiefly impressed, on the one hand, by the mere physical length of the movement, and on the other hand by its extraordinary gait and vivacity. The short, jerky figure in the first subject sets its pace, and it proceeds headlong to a huge coda, ending with a gigantic booming of tonic chords recalling the thunderous finale of the Fifth. Beethoven himself once said that he had written it in an “unbuttoned” spirit, and the adjective well describes its character. Some of its harmonic progressions, particularly the furious bellowing of C sharp by the whole orchestra (save the brass!) after the first statement of the first subject, must have given the musical amateurs of Vienna rude jolt in 1814. Many other such deviltries are in it; more than once there is a genuine war of keys, as when the horns and trumpets, supported by the kettle-drums, break in with a vast F natural upon a brilliant passage in F sharp minor, and so drag the whole orchestra with them, as it were, by sheer strength. Such things are now commonplace; a composer who writes in but one key at a time is condemned to the excursion boats; a semitone is nothing between friends. But in 1814 there was taste for suaver, meeker doings, and so old Ludwig was looked at askance by the critics of the Kaiserstadt, and the foundation was laid for his reputation as a bold and somewhat dangerous man, with leanings toward republicanism. In those days all heretics were called republicans, just as they were called atheists 40 years ago, and are suspected of being German spies today.

§6.

But Beethoven, you may be sure, was not a republican, all the traditional gabble about the Eroica to the contrary notwithstanding. He was so little a believer in the equality madness, in truth, that he was disposed to put himself far above the highly sniffish Austrian aristocracy of his time, including even royalty. Everyone, I dare say, has heard the story of his encounter with the royal family at Carlsbad, in company with Goethe. Goethe, a courtier to the heart, halted, bared his head and bowed profoundly, but Beethoven stalked on. A proof of a democratic spirit? Nay, a proof of illimitable (and quite well supported) egoism, of a congenital incapacity for condescension. His attitude toward the proletariat was quite as ungenial; he used a walking stick on the peasants on his brother’s estate. Beethoven, in brief, knew very well that he was a better man than the vast majority of the men surrounding him, and he was far too honest to conceal his knowledge of the fact. If we had no other proof of his politics, a study of his symphonies would settle the question. Beauty on such a colossal scale is not created by democrats. Its production is the exclusive business of an aristocracy, and an aristocracy is always conscious of itself.

The chief use of such glorious music as he composed is not that it pleasantly amuses lesser men in their hours of leisure, and so improves their temper and digestion, but that it enables the more observant of them to look into the mind of a superior man, and to learn something thereby about the higher flights and exercises of the human spirit. It is in this sense that an experience of great art may be plausibly compared to an experience of religion. It has, moreover, the advantage of being less corrupted by what may be called democratic concessions. All religions, at least in Christendom, are based upon the notion that one human soul is as good as another, and so they are forced into stooping down to those souls that are mean and disgusting. (For an extreme example, observe the obscene hocus-pocus of Dr. Sunday and his imitators.) But great art takes no need of the hopelessly petty and degraded. It addresses itself solely to those who have been emancipated, at least in some measure, from the ignoble fears and aspirations of the mob. Now and then, perhaps, it may reach far down, but it never essays to reach to the very bottom.

It is thus somewhat inaccurate to say that great art may attain to the dignity of a religion. What should be said is that religion, if the fates be kind, may occasionally attain to the dignity of a great art. This happens only in the case of those religions that are organized upon aristocratic lines—e. g., pre-Reformation Christianity. It is characteristic of all such religions that the elements which make them beautiful, and hence venerable, are quite incomprehensible to the mob, and that they are the first things destroyed by the mob when it attempts to translate the doctrine of equality before the Lord into a scheme of equality in His House.

§7.

Here, however, I wander into matters inappropriate for discussion in program notes. My excuse is that the writing of genuine program notes, or, indeed, of any other sort of treatise, however modest, upon the subject of music is an intolerably hazardous undertaking for a musical amateur. There is only one more dangerous business known to military surgery: the composition of tracts upon comparative religion. As I grow older, fatter and lazier year by year, I also grow more prudent, and so I forestall a rough beating in the present case by retreating before I am actually walloped. If I have said anything in these few lines that goes counter to any gentleman’s private opinion of Beethoven, or of music in general, or that violates what is orthodox, respectable and commonly admitted, or that evinces a tendency to venture into realms wherein I have no business, or that is offensive for any other reason, real or imaginary, I herewith apologize most humbly and promise to sin no more.