Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Volume 14

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Little
Journeys
To the Homes of the Great

Elbert Hubbard

Anniversary Edition

Printed and made into a Book by
The Roycrofters, who are in East
Aurora, Erie County, New York

Wm. H. Wise & Co.
New York

Copyright, 1916,
By The Roycrofters

CONTENTS

RICHARD WAGNER 9

PAGANINI 47

FREDERIC CHOPIN 75

ROBERT SCHUMANN 107

SEBASTIAN BACH 133

FELIX MENDELSSOHN 161

FRANZ LISZT 185

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN 221

GEORGE HANDEL 249

GIUSEPPE VERDI 273

WOLFGANG MOZART 297

JOHANNES BRAHMS 331

INDEX

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|Transcriber's note: Obvious spelling and punctuation errors have been|
|corrected. All other inconsistencies are as in the original. |
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[Illustration: RICHARD WAGNER]

RICHARD WAGNER

Was ever work like mine created for no purpose? Am I a miserable
egotist, possessed of stupid vanity? It matters not, but of this I
feel positive; yes, as positive as that I live, and this is, my
"Tristan and Isolde," with which I am now consumed, does not find
its equal in the world's library of music. Oh, how I yearn to hear
it; I am feverish; I am worn. Perhaps that causes me to be agitated
and anxious, but my "Tristan" has been finished now these three
years and has not been heard. When I think of this I wonder whether
it will be with this as with "Lohengrin," which now is thirteen
years old, and is still dead to me. But the clouds seem breaking,
they are breaking--I am going to Vienna soon. There they are going
to give me a surprise. It is supposed to be kept a secret from me,
but a friend has informed me that they are going to bring out
"Lohengrin."

--_Wagner in a Letter to Praeger_

RICHARD WAGNER

Absurd and silly people make jokes about mothers-in-law, stepmothers and
stepfathers--we will none of this. My heart warms to the melancholy
Jacques, who dedicated his book to his mother-in-law, "my best friend,
who always came when she was needed and never left so long as there was
work to do." Richard Wagner's stepfather was his patient, loving and
loyal friend.

The father of Wagner died when the child was six months old. The mother,
scarcely turned thirty, had a brood of seven, no money and many debts.
There is trouble for you--ye silken, perfumed throng, who nibble
cheese-straws, test the hyson when it is red, and discuss the
heartrending aspects of the servant-girl problem to the lascivious
pleasings of a lute!

But the widow Wagner was not cast down to earth--she resolved on keeping
her family together, caring for them all as best she could. The
suggestion from certain kinsmen that the children should be given out
for adoption was quickly vetoed. The fine spirit of the woman won the
admiration of a worthy actor, in slightly reduced circumstances, who had
lodgings in the house of the widow. This actor, Ludwig Geyer by name,
loved the widow and all of the brood, and he proposed that they pool
their poverty.

And so before Mrs. Wagner had been a widow a twelvemonth they were
married.

In this marriage Geyer seemed to be moved to a degree by the sentiment
of friendship for his friend, the deceased husband. Geyer was a man of
many virtues--amiable, hopeful, kind. He had the artistic temperament
without its faults. To writers of novels, in search of a very choice
central character, Ludwig Geyer affords great possibilities. He was as
hopeful as Triplett and a deal more versatile. The histrionic art
afforded him his income of eleven dollars a week; but painting was his
forte--if he only had time to devote to the technique! Yet all the arts
being one he had written a play; he also modeled in clay and sang tenor
parts as understudy to the great Schudenfeldt. Hope, good-cheer and a
devotion to art were the distinguishing features of Mein Herr Geyer.

All this was in the city of Leipzig; but Herr Geyer becoming a member of
the Court Theater, the family moved to Dresden, where at this time lived
one Weber, a composer, who used to walk by the Geyer home and
occasionally stop in for a little rest. At such times one of the
children would be sent out with a pitcher, and the great composer and
Herr Geyer would in fancy roam the realm of art, and Herr Geyer would
impart to Herr Weber valuable ideas that had never been used. The little
boy, Richard, used to cherish these visits of Weber, and would sit and
watch for hours for the coming of the queer old man in the long gray
cloak.

The stork, one fine day, brought Richard a little sister. He was scarce
two years older than she. These two sort of grew up together, and were
ever the special pets of Herr Geyer, who used to take them to the
theater and seat them on a bench in the wings where they could watch him
lead the assault in "The Pirate's Revenge."

Richard regarded his stepfather with all the affection that ever a child
had for its own parent; and until he was twenty-one was known to the
world as Richard Wilhelm Geyer.

The comparison of Ludwig Geyer with Triplett is hardly fair, for Geyer's
fine effervescence and hopeful, rainbow-chasing qualities were confined
to early life.

As the years passed Geyer settled down to earnest work and achieved a
considerable success both as an actor and as a painter. The unselfish
quality of the man is shown in that his income was freely used to
educate the Wagner children. He was sure that Richard had the germ of
literary ability in his mental make-up, and his ambition was that the
boy should become a writer. But alas! Geyer did not live long enough to
know the true greatness of this child he had fostered and befriended.

Unlike so many musicians Richard was not precocious. He was slow,
thoughtful and philosophic; and music did not attract him so much as
letters. Incidentally he took lessons in music with his other studies,
and his first teacher, Gottlieb Muller, has left on record the statement
that the boy was "self-willed and eccentric, and not fluid enough in
spirit to succeed in music."

The mother of Wagner seems to have been a woman of marked mentality--not
especially musical or poetic, but possessing a fine appreciation of all
good things, and best of all, she had commonsense. She very early came
to regard Richard as her most promising child, and before he was ten
years of age, said to a friend, "Richard will be able to succeed at
anything he concentrates his mind upon."

The truth of the remark has often been reiterated. The youth was superb
in his mental equipment--strong, capable, independent. Had he turned his
attention to any other profession, or any branch of art or science, he
could have probed the problem to its depths, and made his mark upon the
age in which he lived.

In height Wagner was a little under size, but his deep chest, well-set
neck, and large, shapely head gave him a commanding look. In physique he
resembled the "big little men" like Columbus, Napoleon, Aaron Burr,
Alexander Hamilton and John Bright--men born to command, with ability to
do the thinking for a nation.

It's magnificent to be a great musician, and many musicians are nothing
else, but it is better to be a man than a musician. Richard Wagner was a
man. Environment forced literature upon his attention: he desired to be
a great poet. He wrote essays, stories, quatrains, epics. Chance sent
the work of Beethoven within his radius, and he became filled with the
melody of the master. Young men of this type, full of the pride of
youth, overflowing with energy, search for a something on which to try
their steel. Wagner could write poetry, that was sure, and more, he
could prepare the score and set his words to music. He fell upon the
work like one possessed--and he was. To his amazement the difficulties
of music all faded away, and that which before seemed like a hopeless
task, now became luminous before the heat of his spirit.

Nothing is difficult when you put your heart in it.

The obstacles to be overcome in setting words to sounds were like a game
of chess--a pleasing diversion. In a month he knew as much of the
science of music as many men did who had grubbed at the work a lifetime.
"The finances! Get your principles right and then 'tis a mere matter of
detail, requiring only concentration--I will arrange it," said Napoleon.

Wagner focused on music, yet here seems a good place to say that he
never learned either to play the piano or to sing. He had to trust the
"details" to others. Yet at twenty he led an orchestra. Soon after he
became conductor of the opera at Magdeburg.

In some months more he drifted to Konigsberg, and there acted as
conductor at the Royal Theater. In the company of this theater was a
young woman by the name of Wilhelmina Planer. Wagner got acquainted with
her across the footlights. She was young, comely and all that--they
became engaged. Shortly afterwards, one fine moonlight night, in
response to her merry challenge, they rang up the "Dom" and were
married. They got better acquainted afterward.

* * * * *

It is a fact that Wagner's imprudent marriage at the age of twenty-three
has been much regretted and oft lamented. "What," say the Impressionable
Ones, "Oh, what could he not have accomplished with a proper mate!"

It is very true that Minna Planer had no comprehension of the genius of
her husband; that her two feet were always flatly planted on earth, and
her head never reached the clouds; and true it is that she was a weary
weight to him for the twenty-five years they lived together. Still men
grow strong by carrying burdens; and we must remember that Wagner was
what he was on account of what he endured and suffered.

Wagner expressed himself in his art, and all great art is simply the
honest, spontaneous, individual expression of soul-emotion. Had Wagner's
emotions been different he would have produced a totally different sort
of art. That is to say, if Wagner in his youth had loved and wedded a
woman who was capable of giving his soul peace, we would have had no
Wagner; we would have had some one else, and therefore a totally
different expression, or no expression at all. Probably the man would
have been quite content to be a village Kapellmeister. His life being
reasonably complete, his spirit would not have roamed the Universe
crying for rest. The ideals of his wife were so low and commonplace that
she influenced his career by antithesis. His soul was ahungered for the
bread of life, and stones were given him in way of the dull, the ugly,
the affected, the smug, the ridiculous. Wagner's life was a revolt from
the ossified commonplace, a struggle for right adjustment--a heart
tragedy. And all this reaching out of the spirit, all the prayers,
hopes, fears and travail of his soul, are told and told again in his
poetry and in his music.

All art is autobiography.

Minna Planer was amiable and kind, but the frantic effort she made at
times, in public, to be profound or chic must have touched the great man
on the raw. He sought, however, to protect her, and at public gatherings
used to keep very near to her in order that she should not fall into the
clutches of some sharp-witted enemy and be lead on into unseemliness of
speech. The scoffs of critics and the ready-made gibes and jeers of the
mob were to her gospel truth; her husband's genius was a vagary to be
stoutly endured. So for many years she was inclined to pose as one to be
pitied--and so she was. That she suffered at times can not be denied,
yet God is good, and so has put short limit on the sensibilities of the
vain.

But Wagner would never tolerate an unkind word spoken of Minna in his
presence, and once rebuked a friend who sought to console him by saying,
"Never mind, Minna lives her life the best she can, and expresses the
thoughts that come to her--what more do you and I do?"

And in his later years, when calm philosophy was his, he realized that
Minna Planer had supplied him a stinging discontent, a continued unrest
that formed the sounding-board on which his sorrow and his hope and his
faith in the Ideal were echoed forth.

Love is the recurring motif in all of Wagner's plays. A man and a woman,
joined by God, but separated by unkind condition, play their parts, and
our hearts are made by the Master to vibrate in sympathy with the
central idea. Only a broken-hearted man could have conjured forth from
his soul such couples as these: Senta and the Dutchman, Elizabeth and
Tannhauser, Elsa and Lohengrin, Tristan and Isolde, Siegmund and
Sieglinde, Walter and Eva, Siegfried and Brunhilde.

Wagner's unhappy marriage forms the keynote of his art. Every opera he
wrote depicts a soul in bonds. From "The Flying Dutchman" to "Parsifal"
we are shown the struggle of a strong man with cruel Fate; a reaching
out for liberty and light; the halting between duty and inclination; and
the endless search for a woman who shall give deliverance through her
abiding love and faith.

* * * * *

All art seems controlled by fad and fashion. No fashion endures, else
'twere not fashion, and in its character the fad is essentially
transient. Still we need not rail at fashion; it is a form of
periodicity, and periodicity exists through all Nature. There are day
and night, winter and summer, equinox and solstice, work and rest, years
of plenty and years of famine. Comets return, and all fashions come
back. Keep your old raiment long enough and it will be in style.

All things move in an orbit, even theories and religions. Certain forms
of fanaticism come with the centuries--every new heresy is old. All
extremes cure themselves, for when matters get pushed to a point where
the balance of things is in danger of being disturbed, a Reformer
appears and utters his stentorian protest. This man is always ridiculed,
hooted, reviled, mobbed, and very happy indeed is his fate if he is
hanged, crucified or made to drink of the deadly hemlock; for then his
place in the affection of men is made secure, sealed with blood, and we
proclaim him liberator or savior. The Piazza Signora is sacred soil
because there it was that Savonarola died; John Brown's body lies
a-moldering in the grave, but his soul goes marching on; J. Wilkes Booth
linked his own name with that of Judas Iscariot and made his victim
known to the Ages as the Emancipator of Men.

These strong men, sent at the pivotal points in history, are born out
of a sore need--they are sent from God. Yet strong men always exist, but
it is the needs of the hour that develop and bring them to our
attention. Not always have the Reformers been fortunate in their takings
off--many have lingered out lengthening, living deaths in walled-up
cells. The Bastile, Chillon, London Tower, that prison joined to a
palace by the Bridge of Sighs, and all other such plague-spots of blood
are haunted by the ghosts of infamy. Before the memory of all those who
wrote immortal books behind grated bars we stand uncovered.

Exile has been the lot of many who tried to live for sanity, justice and
truth when mad riot raged. Dante, Victor Hugo, Prince Kropotkin and
Wagner are types to which we turn. Then there is an attenuated form of
persecution known as ostracism, which consists in being exiled at home,
but of this it is not worth while to speak.

Wagner was a strong, honest man who simply desired to express his better
self. The elements of caution and expediency were singularly lacking in
his character. These qualities of independence and self-reliance brought
him into speedy collision with those who stood in the front rank of the
artistic world of his day, and he became a marked man. His offense was
that he expressed his honest self.

In Eighteen Hundred Forty-three, when he appeared upon the scene in
Dresden as Hofkapellmeister of the Royal Theater, matters musical were
just about where the stage now is in America. In this Year of Grace,
Nineteen Hundred One, the great Shakespeare has been elbowed from the
stage by the author of "A Texas Steer"; and where once the haughty
Richard trod the boards, the skirt-dance assumes the center of the stage
and looms lurid like the spirit of the Brocken. Recently a vaudeville
"turn" of Hamlet has been presented, where the gravediggers do their
gruesome tasks to ragtime; and on every hand we behold the Lyceum giving
way to the McClure Continuous, Lim.

Wagner abhorred the mere tune for the sake of tune. "You can not produce
art and leave man out," he said. All art must suggest something. Mere
verbal description is not literature: it is only words, words, words; a
picture must be charged with soul, otherwise a photograph would outrank
"The Angelus." Music must be more than jingling tunes and mincing
sounds. And thus we find Wagner at thirty years of age boldly putting
forth "The Flying Dutchman," with music not written for the text, nor
text written for the music, but words and music created at the same
time--the melody mirroring forth the soul of the words.

In this play Wagner for the first time sacrificed every precedent of
musical construction and all thought of symmetrical form, in order to
make the music tell the tale. "The Flying Dutchman" is to opera what
Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" is to poetry, or Millet's "Sower" is
to painting. There is strength, heroic strength, in each of these
masterpieces I have named, but the "Dutchman" needs a listener, "Leaves
of Grass" requires a reader who has experienced, and the "Sower" demands
one who has eyes to see, before its lesson of love and patience and the
pathetic truth of endless toil are bodied forth.

Whitman's book was well looked after by the local Antonius Ash-Box
inspector of the day, its publication forbidden, and the author
incidentally deprived of his clerkship at Washington; Millet did service
as the butt for jokes of artistic Paris, and was dubbed "The Wild Man";
Wagner's play was hooted off the stage.

* * * * *

Every man is but a type representing his class. Of course the class may
be small and one man may even be its sole living representative: but
Wagner had his double in William Morris. These men were brothers in
temperament, physique, habit of thought and occupation.

Wagner wrote largely on the subjects of Art and Sociology, and made his
appeal for the toiler in that the man should be allowed to share the
joys of Art by producing it. His argument is identical with that of
William Morris; and yet the essays of Wagner were not translated into
English until after Morris had written his "Dream of John Ball," and
Morris did not read German.

Both men hark back to a time when Man and Nature were on friendly terms;
when the thought, best exemplified by the early Greeks, of the
sacredness of the human body was recognized; when the old medieval
feeling of helpful brotherhood yet lingered; and the restless misery of
competition and all the train of woe, squalor and ugliness that
"civilization" has brought were unknown.

Wagner's music is made up of the sounds of Nature conventionalized. You
hear the sighing of the breeze, the song of the birds, the cries of
animals, the rush of the storm. Wagner's essay, entitled, "Art and
Revolution," is the twin to the lecture, "Art and Socialism," by Morris;
and in the "Art-Work of the Future," Wagner works out at length the
favorite recurring theme of Morris: work is for the worker, and art is
the expression of man's joy in his work.

In Eighteen Hundred Forty-four, when Morris was ten years of age, Wagner
wrote:

"I compose for myself; it is just a question between me and my Maker. I
grow as I exercise my faculties, and expression is a necessary form of
spiritual exercise. How shall I live? Express what I think or feel, or
what you feel?

"No, I must be honest and sincere. I must, for the need of myself, live
my own life, for work is for the worker, at the last. Each man must
please himself, and Nature has placed her approbation on this by
supplying the greatest pleasure men ever know as a reward for doing good
work. I hate this fast-growing tendency to chain men to machines in big
factories and deprive them of all joy in their efforts--the plan will
lead to cheap men and cheap products. I set my face against it and plead
for the dignity and health of the open air, and the olden time."

This sort of talk led straight to Wagner's arrest in the streets of
Dresden on the charge of inciting a riot; and it was the identical line
of argument that caused the arrest of Morris in Trafalgar Square,
London, when he was taken struggling to the station-house.

Wagner was exiled and Morris merely "cautioned," placed under police
surveillance and ostracized. The difference in time explains the
difference in punishment. A century earlier and both men would have
forfeited their heads.

In all of Wagner's operas the scene is laid at a time when the
festivals, games and religious ceremonies were touched with the thought
of beauty. Men were strong, plain, blunt and honest. Affectation,
finesse, pretense and veneer were unknown. Art had not resolved itself
into the possession of a class of idlers and dilettantes who hired
long-haired men and fussy girls in Greek gowns to make pretty things for
them. All worked with their hands, through need, and when they made
things they worked for utility and beauty. They gave things a beautiful
form, because men and women worked together, and for each other. And
wherever men and women work together we find Beauty. Men who live only
with other men are never beautiful in their work, or speech, or lives,
neither are women. But at this early time life was largely communal,
natural, and Art was the possession of all, because all had a share in
its production. Observe the setting of any Wagner opera where Walter
Damrosch has his way and get that flavor of bold, free, wholesome,
honest Beauty. And yet no stage was ever large enough to quite satisfy
Wagner, and all the properties, if he had had his way, would have been
works of Art, thought out in detail and materialized for the purpose by
human hands.

Now turn to "The Story of the Glittering Plain," "Gertha's Lovers,"
"News From Nowhere" or "The Hollow Land," by William Morris, and note
the same stage-setting, the same majesty, dignity and sense of power.
Observe the great underlying sense of joy in life, the gladness of mere
existence. A serenity and peace pervades the work of both of these men;
they are mystic, fond of folklore and legend; they live in the open, are
deeply religious without knowing it, have nothing they wish to conceal,
and are one with Nature in all her many moods and manifestations--sons
of God!

* * * * *

In the history of letters there is a writer by the name of Green, who
exists simply because he reviled a contemporary poet by the name of
Shakespeare. Green's name is embalmed in immortal amber with that of
Richard Quiney, who wrote a letter to the author of "The Tempest"
begging the favor of a loan of forty pounds.

There are several ways of winning fame. Joseph Jefferson has written in
classic style of Count Johannes and James Owen O'Connor, who played
"Hamlet" to large and enthusiastic audiences, behind a wire screen; then
there was John Doe, who fired the Alexandrian Library, and Richard Roe,
the man who struck Billy Patterson. Besides these we have the Reverend
Obadiah Simmons of Nashville, Tennessee, who, in Eighteen Hundred Sixty,
produced a monograph proving that negroes had no souls, the value of
which work, to be sure, is slightly vitiated when we remember that the
same arguments were used, in Seventeen Hundred One, by Bishop Volberg,
in showing that women were in a like predicament.

And now Henry T. Finck has compiled a list of more than one hundred
names of musical critics who placed themselves on record in opposition
to Richard Wagner and his music. Only such men as proved themselves past
masters in density and adepts in abuse are given a place in this Academy
of Immortals.

No writer, musician or artist who ever lived brought down on his head
an equal amount of contumely and disparagement as did Richard Wagner.
Turner, Millet and Rodin have been let off lightly compared with the
fate that was Wagner's; and even the shrill outcry that was raised in
Boston at sight of MacMonnies' Bacchante was a passing zephyr to the
storm that broke over the head of Wagner in Paris, when, after one
hundred sixteen rehearsals, "Tannhauser" was produced.

The derisive laughter, catcalls, shouts, hisses and uproar that greeted
the play were only the shadow of the criticisms that filled the daily
press, done by writers who mistook their own anserine limitations for
inanity on the part of the composer. They scorned the melody they could
not appreciate, like men who deny the sounds they can not hear; or those
who might revile the colors they could not distinguish. And worse than
all this, the aristocratic hoodlums refused to allow any one else to
enjoy, and would not tolerate the thought that that which to them was
"jumbling discord, seven times confounded" might be a succession of
harmonies to one whose perceptions were more fully developed.

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