Music after the Great War
Carl Van Vechten's "Music After the Great War" argues that the outbreak of World War I will not sever music's line of development but instead accelerate a progression already underway before 1914. Rejecting Leo Stein's claim that modernist experimentation in painting and music will collapse once the war ends, Van Vechten contends that the "disharmonies" of contemporary composers are a logical continuation from Wagner rather than a freakish aberration, and that post-war art-music will be "newer," meaning more primitive, than what preceded it. He surveys the state of composition nation by nation to locate where this future is likeliest to emerge. Germany, he argues, has passed its zenith: minor figures like Kretzschmer, Goldmark, Nessler, Bungert, Schillings, and Pfitzner are dismissed as spent or negligible, Humperdinck is confined to the folk-idiom success of "Hänsel und Gretel," and even Richard Strauss, though the most considerable German musical figure of the era, has exhausted his idiom and belongs to the "riches of the past" rather than to what comes next. Among Austrians, the young Erich Korngold is intriguing but unformed, while Arnold Schoenberg is singled out as a genuine harbinger of the future — a composer whose audience has not yet caught up with music he wrote years earlier, and whose 1911 "Handbuch der Harmonielehre" is quoted at length as a manifesto valuing novelty and the artist's compulsion to follow his own vision rather than prevailing taste. France, Van Vechten holds, produced the essential innovations of the prior two decades — the whole-tone scale usage traced to Debussy, Erik Satie, and Fanelli — but its leading figures (Dukas, Debussy, Ravel, d'Indy, Charpentier) have not recently produced epoch-making work, so France is unlikely to furnish the post-war breakthrough despite operas like Laparra's "La Habanera" and Ravel's "l'Heure Espagnole." Italy remains dominated by an aging Verdi-Puccini operatic tradition; Puccini's powers are seen as declining after "Manon Lescaut," Mascagni and Leoncavallo are repeating themselves fruitlessly, and most other Italian names are already fading, though Zandonai, on the strength of "Conchita" and the promise of "Francesca da Rimini," is flagged as a talent worth watching. Spain is only beginning to develop composers of its own, its idiom so far mostly borrowed by outsiders like Bizet, Chabrier, Debussy, Laparra, and Zandonai. England fares worst in Van Vechten's estimation: he finds little merit in Elgar and no substantial English composer since Sullivan, though he allows some interest in Cyril Scott. American music is judged to have no significant ante-bellum tradition beyond MacDowell and Nevin, though Van Vechten uses the occasion to rebut the recurring complaint that American composers are neglected, pointing to the popularity of pieces like "To a Wild Rose," "Narcissus," and "The Rosary," and to regular orchestral and operatic performances of native composers. Finland's Sibelius and Poland's Karol Szymanowski are noted as promising voices from smaller nations, the latter singled out as a possible composer of wartime national suffering. But it is Russia to which Van Vechten turns as the true source of post-war music. He draws a parallel between Russian and Irish literary awakening, describing how Russia's nineteenth-century literary flowering — Turgenev, Gogol, Pushkin, Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky — paralleled a musical awakening rooted in folk material, exemplified by Mussorgsky's "Boris Godunow" and "La Khovanchina," works he praises extensively, including the death scene of Prince Ivan Khovansky as one of opera's most powerful moments. He champions Rimsky-Korsakov's largely unheard operas in America, especially "The Golden Cock," and eulogizes the recently deceased Alexander Scriabine as a visionary theorist whose synthesis of music, light, and perfume was never fully realized in his own work but has influenced others, notably the Ballets Russes. The essay culminates in an endorsement of Igor Stravinsky as likely the greatest musician of the immediate future, praising "The Nightingale" and the ballets, including the rhythmic complexity of "The Sacrifice to the Spring" (Le Sacre du Printemps), and predicting that the strongest new voices after the war will come not from England, America, France, or Germany, but from Russia — a "gradual return to orientalism" that Van Vechten frames as a coming cultural gift from the East.
By Carl Van Vechten · First published 1915 · Genre: Music criticism, Essay, Cultural criticism