Welsh Journals

French and German musicians was only in part shared by their British colleagues, for though Victorian composers reached some social eminence, their intellects remained only half awake. To demon- strate the truth of this, one has only to examine a score or so of the cantatas, oratorios and songs that were poured out so profusely by the eminent English composers between the dates 1840 and 1880 in nearly all cases the words that inspired them to song were of extreme feebleness. Joseph Bennett, for example, would never have been a poet at all, if he had not been friendly with various composers, whose friendship proved profit- able to himself. But not a line of his verse is remembered to-day, and, when one (very occasionally) comes across it in a programme-book, one gets an unwelcome glimpse into the lack of poetic appreciation of the composers who patronised him. The younger generation of composers have changed all that. One may look in vain for stupid texts among the music of Sir Edward Elgar, Mr Granville Bantock, Mr. Joseph Holbrooke, Dr. Walford Davies and Mr. Frederick Delius. Even those of our lesser composers who find it necessary, in order to get a living, to write down" to a popular public, generally contrive to secure verse that has about it some note of distinction. For a century, then, the great composers of Europe have recognised that a great song or scena, or opera, is not merely great music set to feeble words, but great music set to great words. As Mr. Gerald Cumberland has recently pointed out, a song is words plus music, each of the two elements being mutually interdependent and equally important; if one of these elements is poor, the song, as a work of art, must suffer in consequence. Great words with stupid music do not make a complete work of art any more than do stupid words allied to great music; to achieve artistic success, both words and music must be equally fine. This, of course, is so obvious that I am amazed that it has not been widely recognised; but the ordinary amateur appears to imagine that the only requisite thing in a song is good music. Now, to my mind, the greatest of all song composers is Hugo Wolf indeed, if greatness in a song-composer consists in the amount of exactitude and exaltation with which he interprets the poetry that forms the basis of his songs, it can be de- monstrated without a shadow of dispute that no other song writer can be compared with him. Schubert wrote some scores of unforgettable songs but he wrote many more that are absolute failures. It was a more or less constant habit with him to write a melody and accompaniment for the first stanza of a lyric, and repeat both melody and accompaniment for each of the successive stanzas, no matter how different they were from the first in emotional content and intellectual significance. Not even a fifth-rate composer of to-day would dream of doing this, for if he did no one would take him in the least seriously. And it is difficult to understand how Schubert came to fall into this astounding error, for he frequently avoided it and, seemingly, without the least trouble. Examine, for example, his setting of Goethe's The Erl King which, in spite of its popularity, is perhaps the greatest of hts songs. In the course of this work the mood changes dozens of times as soon as the poetry quickens in feeling or in action, the music quickens with it the most subtle hints in the text are reflected with almost magical skill in the sound. Here, words and music are not two separate entities, but one inseparable living organism. When once you have become closely acquainted with