April 1937

The GRAMOPHONE

461

people, both orally and in print, that i t is impossible to listen to music and write at the same time. I deny that. I deny that anybody can listen to a long string quartet or a symphony and exelude from his mind every thought except of the music itself. Even the listening critic with a first-hand knowledge of playing in a quartet or of conducting an orchestra, though he might succeed in banishing from his mind every thought extraneous to the music, by the mere fact of criticizing this or that instrument, this or that interpretation of some phrase, would inevitably introduce extraneous contemplation because such criticism must involve a retrospective contemplation, were i t never so momentary. I have mentioned before that Elgar once assured me no man could listen with his whole attention to every note of even a short composition, and pointed out that the mere passing of the hand across the forehead might obliterate a musical moment of the utmost significance. I should not attempt to pass judgment on any performance to which I had not listened with all the deliberate attention, I could give to it, but I will claim that the half-listening in which I indulge as a preliminary wi}] always (and usually at the first hearing) let me know if some recording deserves an undivided attention. When this new Busch Quartet version of the E flat Minor was first played to me I was concentrated upon a page of my book which was going well, and therefore I was listening with less than half an ear to the music. Yet, so impressive were the very first notes of this performan ce, I was immediately aware of something unusual, and putting down my pen I listened in what was really a rapture until the very last note. Yet even that rapture must have retained within itself the movement onward of the book I am writing, because the instant the quartet was finished I went on as if I had not sat back idle in my chair for about three quarters of an hour.

A. R. in his review said he pitied " the man who could hear unmoved the deeply religious third variation in E major which begins at Part 5." And this brings me to the spiritual consolation of those last great quartets, or at any rate of four of them. The last of all in F major, Op. 135, I have never felt as a spiritual influence. In this distracted t ime many people derive refreshment and reassurance and what must certainly be called spiritual comfort from the music of Bach. I t is true that a world of sound in which order predominates must possess great healing virtues, but I fancy Bach's music offers consolation by the escape or refuge i t offers from an insistent world. The ordered life of which he reminds us is as remote as the Golden Age. You will remember the lines Browning wrote about Wordsworth when he accepted the poet laureateship:

Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us, Burns, Shelley, were with us,-they watch from their graves!

He alone breaks from the van and the freemen,He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves! Like Shakespeare, Beethoven was of us. His suffering as a man is comparable to the suffering of modern humanity. That in poverty, illness, deafness, and anguish of mind he could write the sublime adagio of this E flat major quartet is so convincing a piece of evidence of man's spiritual destiny that i t is impossible to believe i t was produced by any mathematical accident or by any fortuitous flow of the endocrine glands.

If I was a little disappointed with the Roth Quartet's interpretation of the first two movements of the Death and the Maiden quartet, I found their interpretation and performance of Beethoven's First Rasoumovsky Quartet in F major magnificent. My praise of the recording of the Bmch E flat minor must be coupled with equal praise of this Columbia album of the First Rasoumovsky. May the other two quartets of Opus 59 soon be added to the Columbia catalogue! The three Rasoumovsky quartets are the bridge by which the lover of chamber music passes from Haydn, Mozart and early Beethoven to the glories of later Beethoven chamber music, from which he passes back again in a sense to appreciate the Brahms and Schubert quartets and quintets with new ears. I have spoken of the spiritual influence of Beethoven's later chamber music, and I am going to claim that the three Rasoumovsky quartets possess an almost liturgical significance. No amount of repetition can exhaust their statement of man's destiny. They contain the whole of music in what is in effect a single composition, and they are within the comprehension of anybody who can distinguish one simple tune from another. By within the comprehension of everybody I mean of everybody who will have the patience to give as much attention to music as the Roman mob gave to Marc Antony. I should not say this without personal experience, and i t distresses me to know that there are still many readers of THE GRAMOPHONE who refuse, for no other reason than lack of faith, to avail themselves of what music can offer them. If I read through what I have written in former numbers of this paper I am astounded by the number of musical conversions I have experienced to my own profit, and I know from countless letters during the last fourteen years that I am only one of hundreds who have been experiencing such conversions. That cursed word "highbrow" has been a great enemy to British taste. When I first heard i t in America in the autumn of I 9 I 2 i t was used to denote a slightly self-conscious intellectual. I t was in fact an American synonym for the old English word" prig." As such i t delighted me, and as far as I can make out I was the first to circulate the word on this side of the Atlantic, having brought i t back from my visit to America like any other traveller's souvenir of some place he had visited. Unfortunately, " highbrow" has lost its synonymity with" prig" and