Sergei Koussevitzky and His Epoch

GARO

PART I

CHAPTER ONE

A Portrait

THE WHOLE OF SERGEI KOUSSEVITZKY’S LIFE BEARS the impress of one single passion—his ardent love for music—which consumes his being as with fire.

A sharp distinction must be drawn between the love of an artist for his profession—the normal love of that for which he has a vocation—and the love of which we are speaking. Every artist who gives himself up entirely to some branch of art has, of course, and cannot help having, a love for it.

This is undoubtedly true, but the love which binds Koussevitzky to music is of an altogether different order. His relations with music have never been of the legitimate, normally established, professional type; all his life he has been her infatuated and clandestine lover. He is enamoured of his music with an ardour that nothing has ever quenched, and to this day the strength and vitality of his passion remain unimpaired. The vehemence, folly, and audacity of youth may have been replaced by wisdom and experience, but the flame of love burns as strongly as at any time, and will, I think, continue to do so as long as life endures.

Koussevitzky, the eternally youthful and insatiable lover of music, has become her lawful spouse—and in this is the key to the comprehension of himself and his activities. His art has been capricious and self-willed; it has not submitted to the established traditions and the rules of behaviour laid down for conductors. It has often been, and at times still is, at variance with them, preferring to act on independent and individual lines.

To me his conduct as an artist is most interesting when it is at cross purposes with the normal and usual, when it transgresses the bounds of the generally recognized and normalized decorum; far more so than when it complies with the conventions, joins the professional front, and comes into line with the foremost conductors of the day, the men of outstanding merit, amongst whom he is by universal consent officially included. This general estimate of him, officially established, and widely admitted by the musical press and public, has little interest for me. Among conductor shares on the musical exchange Koussevitzky’s are quoted high. His name, side by side with the best, represents the nth number of aces in the musical pack, and I am not in the least concerned as to which of these aces occupies the first place and which the last. It is entirely conditional. If you and I are playing musical bridge, the ace of trumps depends on the suit declaration. But let us not forget that the ace becomes a trump thanks entirely to the cards which support it, and apart from them is in an awkward situation; therefore the most musical form of musical bridge is always played without trumps.

One result of Koussevitzky’s boundless enthusiasm for music is that he has always rushed at any new thing, no matter how unexpected and paradoxical the form it assumes. Directly a new musical spring is discovered, he draws from it to assuage his continual-musical thirst. He can never have enough of it, and only when the waters prove to be poisonous, bitter, or simply insipid does he abandon them, and then apparently with regret.

Koussevitzky belongs to that category of musical enthusiasts of whom the imaginative literature of music tells us and of whom the professional musical practice of today knows least of all. Such enthusiasts are encountered in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s gallery of heroes. They have an affinity with Kreisler, the mad kapellmeister, their ancestor, and from him they trace their genealogy, and not from the formal traditions and canons of any professional school of conductors, whoever its founder may have been and whoever its head—whether Bülow, Mahler, or Nikisch.

For those who thus love music it becomes the fundamental and supreme meaning of existence. They are organic musicians, and for them nothing can take the place of music. There are others for whom it is a superior handicraft, merely a sensible business, and they find the fundamental and supreme meaning of life in something else, which often has nothing in common with music. Musicians belonging to the first category are almost beyond their profession; for them the centre of gravity in music lies outside its professional zone. If you begin to talk to them about professional questions of technique and craftsmanship, they will answer you absent-mindedly. These men are possessed by music as by an element.

Musicians of the second category are professional through and through, because they are connected with music only by their profession. Technically they are armed to the teeth. For them the outward forms are the most important thing in music. To the musical element they are often frankly hostile, since its intrusion always disturbs their calculations and constructions. Even if they are not hostile, they are indifferent, and many simply do not believe in its existence. In their practice they are aware, not of an ungovernable musical element, but only of the gentle ripples on the surface of the tonal wave; the depths of the element itself, the abysses of its chaos, are unknown to them.

The romantics of the last century belonged to the first category, and their ranks are steadily thinning, whereas the cadres of the second category are constantly being augmented. The numerical superiority of the latter at the present day is explained by the fact that they strive at all costs to be in complete accord with the spirit of the times—to bring culture and art into conformity with the principles governing the organization of modern life.

Koussevitzky is also included in the first category and has no place in the second. At certain moments he may be found with the latter, but simply through weakness and misapprehension, when he wants to be in harmony with his period. He is among them only as a stranger and a guest. Essentially he has no contact with the objectively impersonal tendencies of contemporary music, which applies itself to the formal, constructional, and organizational side of the art. His place is among the solitaries—the romantics, the fantasts, and the visionaries. . . . Here he is himself, at home, surrounded by his own people.

I think it is entirely purposeless to argue as to which is the better, which the worse. We have to reckon with the fact that both kinds of musicians exist. The only question is whether they do good or bad work in connexion with the category to which they belong. It is impossible, for the sake of an abstract principle, to suppress some by others, to destroy one thing in order to affirm another. Every artistic phenomenon should be subject to appraisement as an individual fact, in its individual significance, apart from the general propositions put forward by the conditions of the moment or period, since these propositions, taken as abstract principles, are powerless to augment or diminish anything in respect of art. It is, perhaps, the chief thing we learn from the experience gained when one tendency in art gives way to another. All the rest is, of course, elucidated from the observation of particular cases and the investigation of details.

This division of musicians (whether composers or performers) into two camps is still very sharply defined, notwithstanding that it has become thoroughly irksome, and that the strife between them has lasted for more than a decade. It reminds one of the dissensions in the middle of last century between the adherents of the so-called program music and the supporters of pure music, when Hanslick proclaimed his theory of the musically beautiful. It is essentially almost the same thing over again, but in the conditions of a new time and a new culture. The difference is only in the terms used, in the fact that these tendencies are now called individualism and collectivism respectively. We have again two artistic outlooks opposed to each other—two hostile and irreconcilable worlds, existing simultaneously and repudiating each other. And both tendencies are the living reflection of the times; taken together, they express the contemporary dualism, which defines our contemporary æsthetic as such in its entirety.

Koussevitzky is not a professional in the sense in which the term is understood today, when professionalism is regarded as a self-sufficing technique, an object in itself and not a means to an end; in this sense he is not a professional virtuoso of the orchestra. His professionalism is hardly perceptible in his conducting; with him it occupies the lowest place, and plays a merely menial, subsidiary part, always subordinated to life and the interpretation. It is of the same order as that of a man who walks, eats, drinks, laughs, and weeps, never reflecting on what he is doing.

An exceptionally emotional pathos underlies Koussevitzky’s orchestral conducting. To him it is everything. The professional and technical side of the business is reduced to extracting the emotional pathos from the work he is playing and, in direct contact with the listener, communicating it to him. The quality, power, and convincingness of the performance depend solely on the emotional element which he obtains from the music and imparts to the audience. The less emotional fire there is in the music, the greater will be the resistance of the latter to his conducting; and, conversely, the more a musical composition is saturated with feeling, the more easily will it submit itself to him, and here he will prove to be in his own sphere.

A passionate, sensuous love of music, and the ability to feel, to experience, the music he is performing, are combined in him. With him the one quality nourishes the other. This is the most characteristic feature of his conducting. Koussevitzky cannot remain indifferent to what he is playing, as some professional conductors—orchestral virtuosi—contrive to do. He cannot stand aside and look on, so to speak, but must always be saturated with an intense love for the music. Of course I do not mean to imply that he is always in a state of ecstasy at his concerts. He is master of every gradation and can give a demonstration of any music you choose to mention, but in such a case you will never have a genuine Koussevitzky performance; it will be almost casual and a compromise in regard to himself. Essentially, in the fundamental manifestation of his musical temperament, Koussevitzky is a conductor of musical ecstasy, and this is his principal and most highly characteristic feature. Everything that approximates music to a state of ecstasy is near and dear to him and yields itself freely to his sway.

"With pain I always shall remember

The unproductive land of Tver."

(AKHMATOVA)

CHAPTER TWO

Childhood

SERGEI ALEXANDROVITCH KOUSSEVITZKY WAS BORN on 13/26 June 1874 at Vyshny Volochek, a poor little town, now hardly discoverable on the map, situated in the Tver Government, which forms part of the central zone of Russia. Vyshny Volochek is in no way remarkable, and its small population of a few thousands are submerged in the monotonous, everyday existence characteristic of such a place. A drab, wearisome life, in which nothing changes and one day is as like another as two peas; the years spent in it flash past like the milestones on the highway. A place where every trifling incident assumes enormous importance and is debated in every key; where life is full of trivial cares and petty emotions. A place which the ripples of the world-wave never reach; where everything is always at a standstill, and nothing ever happens; where events occurring in the great cities present themselves to the inhabitants as fantastic and are with difficulty comprehended by them. Where the noises of the music of the world—the vast human life—seem to be merely a dream. . . . How many towns like it are scattered over the huge expanse of the Russian land! And in America! And in Europe! Now, if only a little place such as Vyshny Volochek has the good fortune to become the cradle of a visionary, an artist, a savant, or even of an architect of life, its name will be rescued from obscurity, and will appear in all the dictionaries. In bygone times it would have been the subject of engravings, and today pictures of it will be shown on the cinema screen. Such a town is lucky if it is destined to be the birthplace of someone who will enter into the world-family. In this is its only hope, and the justification for the long years of a sterile and monotonous existence. . . . In what does the justification consist? Surely not in the fact that the inhabitants may be puffed up with pride in their celebrated fellow-townsman, to whose birthplace they have affixed a tablet after his decease or, in the best instance, have erected an abominable memorial on its only square, where, defiled by the pigeons, in the early morning it will be the eternal and immovable witness of the fishwives’ daily squabbles; through the day will be the referee of the games of the youngsters returning home from school; and in the evening twilight will be compelled, resignedly and involuntarily, to overhear the foolish and sensual whispers and babblings of a pair of lovers who have taken refuge on the nearest bench. . . . There you have the fundamental features of what is called posthumous fame.

No, the justification is not in this, but in the fact that when the man goes out