The Gramophone, September, 1923

A Musical Autobiography (continued)

By Compton Mackenzie

My dramatic interest was completely satisfied by Tannhiiuser, but I did not get any emotional uplift out of i t . Even to this day. with rare exceptions, I do not enjoy music emotionally; I think that I enjoy i t for the way i t occupies the waste ground of the mind. I should be inclined to say that for as many people as find church music emotionally satisfying there are at least as many others who can pay attention to prayer because their idle and vagrant thoughts are being occupied by the music. I shall return to this discussion later on when I come to speak of the use to which I have put music as an aid to l i terary composition. At the t ime of which I am writing, and for some years before and after, I was finding in Swinburne's poetry all I required emotionally. I had a pirated American edition, which contained in one volume nearly all the poet had written. Wherever I went that l ight blue volume went with me; and if anybody had suggested to me that I could gct from Chopin what I got from Swinburne I should have laughed. I wonder what is the emotional fodder of adolescence at the moment. There is certainly nothing in contemporary English verse that could feed emotionally any youth of sixteen or seventeen, and the young men of the vVar period were forced into a premature self-expression lik e hyacinths in glasses that flower feebly ever afterward, or they were like accumulators charged by the War, and, now that active service is over, are worn out. . Well, whatever may be the emotional catharsis of the modern young man, I wish him as much joy from the process as I had from Swinburne.

I t was about this period that my first musical friends grew much excited over Tchaikovsky, and I well remember trying to discover the magic that was evidently distilled for th em from the Sixth Symphony (H.M.V. D.713-717). It seems incredible to me when I look back at myself in those days that there really was once a period in which with complete sincerity I could say that I p erceiv ed no melody anywhere in the Sixth Symphony of Tchaikovsky; I seem to be confessing that about thi s t ime I was unable to perceive that sugar was sweet. How well I remember, on a dripping grey morning in February, a genuine Tchaikovsky morning, going to see an Irish friend of mine who was studying to be a professional pianist, and sitting pati ently whire he played over and over again the opening whine of the Sixth Symphony. I can hear him now .

" Do you mean to say you can't hear that i t's a melody?" he cried, using 'every moment a richer brogue.

I shook my head. " It's an affectation," he cried, "to pretend you like the Waldst ein Sonata and say that you can't recognise the ,melody in that."

And off h e went again, playing the phrase over and over with one hand in the treble. But i t was no affectation . I was being perfectly sincere in declaring that I could not perceive the melody_ That was in 1900; and I spent aU the Stimmel' of that year in the heart of France, where I read more than 200 Tauchnitz novels and l istened to the grasshoppers. But I never heard a note of music.

When I went up to Oxford, I had the inestimable advantage of finding myself in a musical set; but out of perversity, or simply because I was still actually unable to enjoy music, I gained nothing from my association. I would not join the Oxford Musical Club, 'where I should have heard good chamber music once a week; I would not go to Balliol Sunday evening concerts; I would not take advantage of the visits of great artists to Oxford. All this t ime music was just a bore. I remember that one somewhat musical friend of mine was always asking another of my very musical friends to play him the Pomp and Circumstance March (H.M.V. D.179), and I remember the friend who was always being asked p1'otesting at being made the exponent of such a cheap piece of melody, and I remember wondering to myself how on earth he arrived at finding something in which I could perceive no melody at all so obvious as to be cheap; but my heart was hardened and I was content to go on disliking music and taking no trouble to like i t .

I t is humiliating when I write these words to look back to that Oxford period and ponder on the wasted t ime and lost opportunities so far a ;; music was concerncd, because my perversity and s illy complacent ignorance can n ever really be made up for by any amount of concentration now. I t was the same with singing, which I could tolerate even less. patiently than instrumental music. I suppose that the moment was not ripe, and i t is idle to lament not having taken advantage of what did not exist. I t is only now, when I try to reconstruct my musical life, that I perceive in what. a desert I existed.

The only reminiscence worth recording of this period was of meeting Donald Tovey at lunch during Eights week, and of leaving soon after lunch because he was playing Beethoven sonatas to an enraptured audience; of returning to tea to find him still there.