Part 3 (1/2)
Besides two small sketches, a waltz and a gavotte, and his own arrangements, for two and for four hands, of the Gaelic March in ”Macbeth,” Kelley has published only three piano pieces: opus 2, ”The Flower Seekers,” superb with grace, warm harmony, and May ecstasies; ”Confluentia,” whose threads of liquidity are eruditely, yet romantically, intertangled to represent the confluence of the Rhine and the Moselle; and ”The Headless Horseman,” a masterpiece of burlesque weirdness, representing the wild pursuit of Ichabod Crane and the final hurling of the awful head,--a pumpkin, some say. It is relieved by Ichabod's tender reminiscences of Katrina Van Ta.s.sel at the spinning-wheel, and is dedicated to Joseffy, the pianist, who lives in the region about Sleepy Hollow.
To supplement his successful, humorously melodramatic setting of ”The Little Old Woman who Went to the Market her Eggs for to Sell,” Kelley is preparing a series of similar pieces called ”Tales Retold for Musical Children.” It will include ”Gulliver,” ”Aladdin,” and ”Beauty and the Beast.”
Kelley once wrote music for an adaptation of ”Prometheus Bound,” made by the late George Parsons Lathrop for that ill-starred experiment, the Theatre of Arts and Letters. The same thoroughness of research that gave Kelley such a command of Chinese theories equipped him in what knowledge we have of Greek and the other ancient music. He has delivered a course of lectures on these subjects, and this learning was put to good and public use in his share in the staging of the novel ”Ben Hur.” His music had a vital part in carrying the play over the thin ice of sacrilege; it was so reverent and so appealing that the scrubwomen in the theatre were actually moved to tears during its rehearsal, and it gave the scene of the miraculous cure of the lepers a dignity that saved it from either ridicule or reproach.
In the first act there is a suggestion of the slow, soft march of a caravan across the sand, the eleven-toned Greek and Egyptian scale being used. In the tent of the Sheik, an old Arabian scale is employed. In the elaborate ballets and revels in the ”Grove of Daphne”
the use of Greek scales, Greek progressions (such as descending parallel fourths long forbidden by the doctors of our era), a trimetrical grouping of measures (instead of our customary fourfold basis), and a suggestion of h.e.l.lenic instruments,--all this lore has not robbed the scene in any sense of an irresistible brilliance and spontaneity. The weaving of Arachne's web is pictured with especial power. Greek traditions have, of course, been used only for occasional impressionisms, and not as manacles. Elaborately colored modern instrumentation and all the established devices from canon up are employed. A piano transcription of part of the music is promised.
The ”Song of Iras” has been published. It is full of home-sickness, and the accompaniment (not used in the production) is a wonderwork of color.
[Music:
Tottering above In her highest noon The enamoured moon blushes with love While to listen The red levin With the rapid pleiads even Which were seven Pauses in heaven!
Pauses in heaven!
And they say the starry choir And the other listening things, That Israfel's fire is owing to that lyre By which he sits and sings The trembling living wire Of those unusual strings Of those unusual strings.
By permission.
FRAGMENT OF ”ISRAFEL,” BY EDGAR S. KELLEY.]
Kelley has two unpublished songs that show him at his best, both settings of verse by Poe,--”Eldorado,” which vividly develops the persistence of the knight, and ”Israfel.” This latter poem, as you know, concerns the angel ”whose heart-strings are a lute.” After a rhapsody upon the cosmic spell of the angel's singing, Poe, with a brave defiance, flings an implied challenge to him. The verse marks one of the highest reaches of a genius honored abroad as a world-great lyrist. It is, perhaps, praise enough, then, to say that Kelley's music flags in no wise behind the divine progress of the words. The lute idea dictates an arpeggiated accompaniment, whose harmonic beauty and courage is beyond description and beyond the grasp of the mind at the first hearing. The bravery of the climax follows the weird and opiate harmonies of the middle part with tremendous effect. The song is, in my fervent belief, a masterwork of absolute genius, one of the very greatest lyrics in the world's music.
_Harvey Worthington Loomis._
[Ill.u.s.tration: HARVEY WORTHINGTON LOOMIS.]
[Ill.u.s.tration: Autograph of Harvey Worthington Loomis]
In the band of pupils that gathered to the standard of the invader, Antonin Dvorak, when, in 1892, he came over here from Macedonia to help us, some of the future's best composers will probably be found.
Of this band was Harvey Worthington Loomis, who won a three years'
scholars.h.i.+p in Doctor Dvorak's composition cla.s.s at the National Conservatory, by submitting an excellent, but rather uncharacteristic, setting of Eichendorff's ”Fruhlingsnacht.” Loomis evidently won Doctor Dvorak's confidence, for among the tasks imposed on him was a piano concerto to be built on the lines of so elaborate a model as Rubinstein's in D minor. When Loomis' first sketches showed an elaboration even beyond the complex pattern, Dvorak still advised him to go on. To any one that knows the ways of harmony teachers this will mean much.
Loomis (who was born in Brooklyn, February 5, 1865, and is now a resident of New York) pursued studies in harmony and piano in a desultory way until he entered Doctor Dvorak's cla.s.s. For his musical tastes he was indebted to the artistic atmosphere of his home.
Though Loomis has written something over five hundred compositions, only a few works have been published, the most important of which are ”Fairy Hill,” a cantatilla for children, published in 1896 (it was written on a commission that fortunately allowed him liberty for not a little elaboration and individuality), ”Sandalphon,” and a few songs and piano pieces.
A field of his art that has won his especial interest is the use of music as an atmosphere for dramatic expression. Of this sort are a number of pantomimes, produced with much applause in New York by the Academy of Dramatic Arts; and several musical backgrounds. The 27th of April, 1896, a concert of his works was given by a number of well-known artists.
These musical backgrounds are played in accompaniment to dramatic recitations. Properly managed, the effect is most impressive. Feval's poem, ”The Song of the Pear-tree,” is a typically handled work. The poem tells the story of a young French fellow, an orphan, who goes to the wars as subst.i.tute for his friend Jean. After rising from rank to rank by bravery, he returns to his home just as his sweetheart, Perrine, enters the church to wed Jean. The girl had been his one ambition, and now in his despair he reenlists and begs to be placed in the thickest of danger. When he falls, they find on his breast a withered spray from the pear-tree under which Perrine had first plighted troth. On these simple lines the music builds up a drama.
From the opening s.h.i.+mmer and rustle of the garden, through the Gregorian chant that solemnizes the drawing of the lots, and is interrupted by the youth's start of joy at his own luck (an abrupt _glissando_); through his st.u.r.dy resolve to go to war in his friend's place, on through many battles to his death, all is on a high plane that commands sympathy for the emotion, and enforces unbounded admiration for the art. There is a brief hint of the Ma.r.s.eillaise woven into the finely varied tapestry of martial music, and when the lover comes trudging home, his joy, his sudden knowledge of Perrine's faithlessness, and his overwhelming grief are all built over a long organ-point of three clangorous bride-bells. The _leit-motif_ idea is used with suggestive clearness throughout the work.
The background to Longfellow's ”Sandalphon” is so fine an arras that it gives the poet a splendor not usual to his bourgeois lays. The music runs through so many phases of emotion, and approves itself so original and exaltedly vivid in each that I put it well to the fore of American compositions.
Hardly less large is the--Loomis calls it ”Musical Symbolism,” for Adelaide Ann Proctor's ”The Story of the Faithful Soul.” Of the greatest delicacy imaginable is the music (for piano, violin, and voice) to William Sharp's ”Coming of the Prince.” The ”Watteau Pictures” are poems of Verlaine's variously treated: one as a head-piece to a wayward piano caprice, one to be recited during a picturesque waltz, the last a song with mandolin effects in the accompaniment.
[Music:
How, erect, at the outermost gates of the City Celestial he waits, With his feet on the ladder of light, That, crowded with angels unnumbered, By Jacob was seen as he slumbered Alone in the desert at night?
The Angels of Wind and of Fire Chant only one hymn, and expire With the song's irresistible stress, Expire in their rapture and wonder, As harp-strings are broken asunder By music they throb to express.