Part 4 (1/2)
It is his individuality. He could make the same reply to such criticism that Schumann made; he thinks in strange rhythms and hunts curious effects, because his tastes are irrevocably so ordained.
But we ought to show a new genius the same generosity toward flaws that we extend toward the masters whose fame is won beyond the patronage of our petty forgiveness. And, all in all, I am impelled to prophesy to Loomis a place very high among the inspired makers of new music. His harmonies, so indefatigably searched out and polished to splendor, so potent in enlarging the color-scale of the piano; his patient building up, through long neglect and through long silence, of a monumental group of works and of a distinct individuality, must prove at some late day a source of lasting pride to his country, neglectful now in spite of itself. But better than his patience, than his courage, than his sincerity, better than that insufficient definition of genius,--the capacity for taking infinite pains,--is his inspired felicity. His genius is the very essence of felicity.
_Ethelbert Nevin._
[Ill.u.s.tration: ETHELBERT NEVIN.]
It is refres.h.i.+ng to be able to chronicle the achievements of a composer who has become financially successful without destroying his claim on the respect of the learned and severe, or sacrificing his own artistic conscience and individuality. Such a composer is Ethelbert Nevin.
His published writings have been altogether along the smaller lines of composition, and he has won an enviable place as a fervent worker in diamonds. None of his gems are paste, and a few have a perfection, a solidity, and a fire that fit them for a place in that coronet one might fancy made up of the richest of the jewels of the world's music-makers, and fas.h.i.+oned for the very brows of the Muse herself.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Autograph of Ethelbert Nevin]
Nevin was born in 1862, at Vineacre, on the banks of the Ohio, a few miles from Pittsburgh. There he spent the first sixteen years of his life, and received all his schooling, most of it from his father, Robert P. Nevin, editor and proprietor of a Pittsburgh newspaper, and a contributor to many magazines. It is interesting to note that he also composed several campaign songs, among them the popular ”Our Nominee,” used in the day of James K. Polk's candidacy. The first grand piano ever taken across the Allegheny Mountains was carted over for Nevin's mother.
From his earliest infancy Nevin was musically inclined, and, at the age of four, was often taken from his cradle to play for admiring visitors. To make up for the deficiency of his little legs, he used to pile cus.h.i.+ons on the pedals so that he might manipulate them from afar.
Nevin's father provided for his son both vocal and instrumental instruction, even taking him abroad for two years of travel and music study in Dresden under Von Bohme. Later he studied the piano for two years at Boston, under B.J. Lang, and composition under Stephen A.
Emery, whose little primer on harmony has been to American music almost what Webster's spelling-book was to our letters.
At the end of two years he went to Pittsburgh, where he gave lessons, and saved money enough to take him to Berlin. There he spent the years 1884, 1885, and 1886, placing himself in the hands of Karl Klindworth. Of him Nevin says: ”To Herr Klindworth I owe everything that has come to me in my musical life. He was a devoted teacher, and his patience was tireless. His endeavor was not only to develop the student from a musical standpoint, but to enlarge his soul in every way. To do this, he tried to teach one to appreciate and to feel the influence of such great minds of literature as Goethe, Schiller, and Shakespeare. He used to insist that a man does not become a musician by practising so many hours a day at the piano, but by absorbing an influence from all the arts and all the interests of life, from architecture, painting, and even politics.”
The effect of such broad training--enjoyed rarely enough by music students--is very evident in Nevin's compositions. They are never narrow or provincial. They are the outpourings of a soul that is not only intense in its activities, but is refined and cultivated in its expressions. This effect is seen, too, in the poems Nevin chooses to set to music,--they are almost without exception verses of literary finish and value. His cosmopolitanism is also remarkable, his songs in French, German, and Italian having no trace of Yankee accent and a great fidelity to their several races.
In 1885, Hans von Bulow incorporated the best four pupils of his friend, Klindworth, into an artist cla.s.s, which he drilled personally.
Nevin was one of the honored four, and appeared at the unique public _Zuh.o.r.en_ of that year, devoted exclusively to the works of Brahms, Liszt, and Raff. Among the forty or fifty studious listeners at these recitals, Frau Cosima Wagner, the violinist Joachim, and many other celebrities were frequently present.
Nevin returned to America in 1887, and took up his residence in Boston, where he taught and played at occasional concerts.
Eighteen hundred and ninety-two found him in Paris, where he taught, winning more pupils than here. He was especially happy in imparting to singers the proper _Auffa.s.sung_ (grasp, interpretation, finish) of songs, and coached many American and French artists for the operatic stage. In 1893 the restless troubadour moved on to Berlin, where he devoted himself so ardently to composition that his health collapsed, and he was exiled a year to Algiers. The early months of 1895 he spent in concert tours through this country. As Klindworth said of him, ”he has a touch that brings tears,” and it is in interpretation rather than in bravura that he excels. He plays with that unusual combination of elegance and fervor that so individualizes his composition.
Desirous of finding solitude and atmosphere for composition, he took up his residence in Florence, where he composed his suite, ”May in Tuscany” (op. 21). The ”Arlecchino” of this work has much sprightliness, and shows the influence of Schumann, who made the harlequin particularly his own; but there is none of Chopin's nocturnity in the ”Notturno,” which presents the sussurus and the moonlit, amorous company of ”Boccaccio's Villa.” The suite includes a ”Misericordia” depicting a midnight cortege along the Arno, and modelled on Chopin's funeral march in structure with its hoa.r.s.e dirge and its rich cantilena. The best number of the suite is surely the ”Rusignuolo,” an exceedingly fluty bird-song.
From Florence, Nevin went to Venice, where he lived in an old _casa_ on the Grand Ca.n.a.l, opposite the Browning palazzo, and near the house where Wagner wrote ”Tristan und Isolde.” One day his man, Guido, took a day off, and brought to Venice an Italian sweetheart, who had lived a few miles from the old dream-city and had never visited it. The day these two spent gondoliering through the waterways, where romance hides in every nook, is imaginatively narrated in tone in Nevin's suite, ”Un Giorno in Venezia,” a book more handsomely published even than the others of his works, which have been among the earliest to throw off the disgraceful weeds of type and design formerly worn by native compositions.
The Venetian suite gains a distinctly Italian color from its ingenuously sweet harmonies in thirds and sixths, and its frankly lyric nature, and ”The Day in Venice” begins logically with the dawn, which is ushered in with pink and stealthy harmonies, then ”The Gondoliers” have a morning mood of gaiety that makes a charming composition. There is a ”Canzone Amorosa” of deep fervor, with interjections of ”Io t'amo!” and ”Amore” (which has the excellent authority of Beethoven's Sonata, op. 81, with its ”Lebe wohl”). The suite ends deliciously with a night scene in Venice, beginning with a choral ”Ave Maria,” and ending with a campanella of the utmost delicacy.
After a year in Venice Nevin made Paris his home for a year, returning to America then, where he has since remained.
Though he has dabbled somewhat in orchestration, he has been wisely devoting his genius, with an almost Chopin-like singleness of mind, to songs and piano pieces. His piano works are what would be called _morceaux_. He has never written a sonata, or anything approaching the cla.s.sical forms, nearer than a gavotte or two. He is very modern in his harmonies, the favorite colors on his palette being the warmer keys, which are constantly blended enharmonically. He ”swims in a sea of tone,” being particularly fond of those suspensions and inversions in which the intervals of the second clash pa.s.sionately, strongly compelling resolution. For all his gracefulness and lyricism, he makes a st.u.r.dy and constant use of dissonance; in his song ”Herbstgefuhl”
the dissonance is fearlessly defiant of conventions.
[Music:
... Rose Loset lebenssatt.
Sich, das letzte lose, Bleiche Blumenblatt.
Goldenes entfarben, Schleicht sich durch den Hain, Auch vergeh'n und sterben, Daucht mir suss zu sein.
... failing, From the rose unbound, Falls, its life exhaling, Dead upon the ground.
Golden colors flying, Slant from tree to tree; Such release and dying, Sweet would seem to me.