Discourse to the Harvard Glee Club

Lucien Price

May 31st, 1945

Last January I heard your concert in Sanders Theatre. Of course you
know you are good! But I wonder if you quite know how good you are. Your
Bach and Händel were majestic, your madrigals in Italian, French, and
English were pleasing, your new music by Ballantine, Copland, and Irving
Fine was interesting, and I laughed immoderately over Mr. Fine's musical
wit. But you may be surprised when I tell you what impressed me most. It
was not your Händel and Bach, magnificent though they were; it was
something which happened when you began singing those choruses from
Gershwin's comic opera. They are easy. All you had to do was enjoy
yourselves. The tunes are good, the words are comical, and you could let
yourselves go. Spontaneity and high spirits are infectious: you remember
how the audience made you sing one of them over again:

Love is sweeping the country,
There never was so much love...

(That tune kept on running through my head for days, until I cursed you
roundly for it.) But all through the concert I saw something which I had
often seen before when your Glee Club has sung, though never quite as
clearly as in the gaiety of those comic choruses. Had I had the time and
strength I would have gone home and written several pages in my note book
of memoranda to myself about what I saw. But there happened to be two wars
on, one in Europe and another in Asia; the European war was detonating
toward its close, and I had to hang over teletype despatches several hours
a day. And yet, as I have noticed so often, in the life of the spirit,
nothing is lost or wasted; and what I would have written to myself last
January I can now say to you face-to-face. What I saw that evening were
young men in the act of expressing themselves through an art-form,
energized to the fullness of their powers. You were all alive and vibrant
to the roots of your beings. The air tingled. Everything in you that is
most gracious and beautiful, from religious worship to the laughter of
high animal spirits, was set flowing. It flowed through you into the
audience and sent us home happy and invigorated.

Now just what was going on? That was not, as I have said, the
first time I had seen this singular manifestation. Several years ago one
winter evening I happened to be passing Symphony Hall. It was lighted. I
remembered that the Harvard Glee Club was singing. I went in. (There were
plenty of seats, you are regretfully informed, so I bought a good one.)
The concert was half over -- Pablo Casals was the assisting artist, and
the next piece was a song by Brahms,

I hear a harp so mild and soft,
It tells of love and longing ...

yes, a bit sentimental, but I still have a soft spot in my head for a
good sentimental ballad. This one had a harp accompaniment with
violoncello obbligato. Señor Casals set his chair and 'cello peg on one of
those low wooden platforms which solo 'cellists sometimes use to increase
the sonority of the instrument in a large hall. He then put on a pair of
horn-rimmed spectacles the better to read the music on his desk, and Dr.
Davison, who then conducted the club, raised his hand to begin ...

(But come now: wouldn't this be a bit risky? Mr. Alfred Holy, the
virtuoso harpist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Señor Pablo Casals, who
is the wonder and admiration of his colleagues, - "Casals" who, they tell
us, "is master of us all, the greatest living player of a stringed
instrument" and a male chorus of musical amateurs, no more. What would
happen?)

What happened was a rich flood of sonorous choral tone, with just a
tinge of that unconscious melancholy which sounds its undernote in the
voices of young men when they sing together well; and this to the
accompaniment of harp arpeggii and that sustained cantilena in which no
instrument equals the 'cello ... As this went on I noticed a singular
thing. Without being aware that he did it, Dr. Davison bent his ear over
that sonority of choral tone the way a violinist bends his ear over his
instrument to savour its richness. That was the first time I saw what was
happening: through music he had found a way to release into articulation
the emotions, the minds, the yearnings, the aspirations, - in two words,
the essential being, - of these young men. "That," thought I then and
there, "is something to have done." Professional musicians slave during
the first part of a lifetime for a technique by which to express
themselves for the second part of a lifetime. In so doing they may gain
their own souls, but they often forfeit something else, youthful
spontaneity. These amateur singers had it: they sang acceptably enough
(Davison had seen to that) but through their singing came that distinctive
electricity of youth, which is in all youth, but which rarely gets
expressed through an art-form. What was going on here? The human
soul, being released in music, was experiencing unawares one of the most
profound varieties of religious experience.

* * *

In a civilization which is not yet sure whether it will survive or
perish; in a world where men are commandeered to slaughter one another by
the millions, why pause seriously over a concord of harmonious sounds?
Isn't it just a little silly?

Let me state a case. You may then, as you would anyhow, decide for
yourselves. A good many years ago and a good many miles from here I was a
lad in a country town. The scenery was mediocre; there were, it is true,
small lakes and woodlands, and the rolling fields under tillage had in
summer a certain placid and smiling beauty; but we knew that to keep our
souls alive something must be done, and we did it. We did it with books
and music. The books were mostly great books, and the music was good
music. Of course we had to make it ourselves. About half a dozen families
set the tone, but scores of others followed. My father being the country
doctor had Darwin's Origin of Species on his shelves twenty years,
I suppose, before anyone else in the county, and, being also the conductor
of the village Philharmonic orchestra, he studied at brief intervals
between professional calls Hector Berlioz's Treatise on
Instrumentation.

My own instrument was the 'cello. (I learned to play it under heavy
pressure and strong protest.) That is, until a brilliant virtuoso 'cellist
of the Chicago Orchestra, still a young man and a remote sort of kinsman,
came for a visit. For the first time I heard what the 'cello could do. A
good deal of chamber music was played in the village and we were working
at Haydn's Trios. "Why don't you try Beethoven's" proposed our guest. It
was the first we knew that Beethoven had written any trios. We sent to New
York for them. They came. Quite a bulky volume, the piano-score;
paper-bound in that pale greenish blue of the Edition Peters.

Our violinist was talented; our pianist was more than talented: she was
a virtuosa schooled by some of the best pianists in the country, but
prevented by an affliction of unsteady nerves from the career of the
concert platform. So she gave piano lessons in an old white wooden mansion
with a portico of Doric columns in a grove of pines about a mile and a
half up the river road, and there she also gave for her friends private
recitals of the very best music. Our 'cello was the weak link. So we
started looking through the trios for something he could play at
sight. And of all trios, which must we pitch upon but the one in B-flat,
Opus 97!

The andante cantabile looks easy. It isn't. By the time you
reach the second variation the going is rough for an adolescent 'cellist.
All the same we kept going. And, as we did so, our eyes bulged with
amazement. You know this history of that trio. It was written in 1812, a
difficult year in Beethoven's life. His affairs were going badly and the
work was not published until 1816. Although two unwritten symphonies were
roaring in his head during this same period, it is possible, and a good
many people think it is probable, that had the pressure of his hardships
been less severe, the material in this trio might have become an
orchestral symphony. Its grandeur goes on increasing; one of the later
variations in the andante cantabile sounds like a passage of free
fantasia in a pianoforte concerto.

We played the movement again. We spent that whole evening playing it
again, and played nothing else. The time was midsummer and rain had been
falling. It was my office to drive the pianist home, - "drive"; in the
equine sense of that verb, to drive a horse, by reins, and hitched into a
phaeton carriage. On my way home, alone, the horse plodding at a walk, for
streets were unpaved and the mud was heavy, Pallas Athene sent me a
thought:

This town is no great shakes. You are only a boy of
sixteen. The future is uncertain, and there is no telling what may
become of you. But one thing is certain: so long as there is such music
in the world, there is always something you can do about the worst that
the world can do to you.

* * *

Now why should I detain you over the solitary meditation of a boy about
a piece of music, - and a good many years ago too? Surely your thoughts
must be preoccupied with far graver concerns. So are mine during the
working-day, or night, telegraph wires tingling and wave-lengths crackling
with horrors that reduce the hell of theology to the status of a feeble
joke. At such times, that world seems the only real one. But I know
better. God was not in the great and strong wind, nor in the fire, not yet
in the earthquake. The spirit is in the still, small voice.

We live in an exploding universe. This is the point to which I speak.
We live in a period when the educated classes, and a good many more
important people than the educated classes only - let me call them the
thinking classes - are outgrowing their traditional religion. We have had
no choice. The roof of inherited belief has been burnt over our heads.
Each new technology profoundly alters, if it do not destroy, the society
built on the old technology. The bronze sword destroyed the society based
on the stone axe; iron destroyed the society based on bronze; steel
supplanted iron; gunpowder is assigned as one of the forces which
destroyed the feudal system. And so we come to the 19th century and the
most revolutionary discovery of all. What was discovered in the 19th
century was a method of discovery. Since then we have lived in an
exploding universe.

Our apparatus of daily living has changed faster in the past hundred
years - one could even say the past fifty - than it had changed in the
previous three thousand. And not our physical existence alone. There is
not an intellectual edifice but has been jostled in this earthquake:
politics, economics, science, theology, art, ethics ... including morals,
not in the narrow and often contemptible 19th century bourgeois definition
of morals, but the whole immense and majestic range of that problem: what
in man constitutes virtue, areth, excellence, nobility?

Certitude has vanished. In 1880 the Newtonian physics were still
unquestioned. Sir Isaac Newton's Principia, published in 1687, had,
so far as anyone then knew, established mathematically the laws which
underlay the workings of the universe, - earth, sky, and all that therein
is. There remained, it is true, a few obscure spots, but these were
thought to be relatively minor points which a few years' investigation
would suffice to clarify. That investigation went forward. By 1900 the
Newtonian physics had blown up. They were, and are, still useful as a way
of looking at things, but can no longer be considered absolutely true -
only a convenient half-truth. Yet the Newtonian physics dealt with that
which is generally supposed to be the most real thing in existence,
matter, the physical universe.

If the physical universe is not real, then what is? This little silver
spoon for after dinner coffee, which the Harvard Club of Boston sends in
with our crimson-rimmed demitasse, looks solid enough. You can whack it on
your cup. Solid? Hah! It is a raging mass of activity. And if our notions
of time were not so arbitrarily conditioned by our own brief life-spans of
seventy or eighty years (as our notions of size are almost as absurdly
governed by the spatial dimensions of our bodies) we might see this little
spoon disintegrating before our eyes. Reality? What is reality? In one of
these little pearl buttons which hold your cuffs together, the distances
of the infinitely small in the universe of electrons are, we are told,
relatively as enormous as the distances up there in

The starry conclave of the midnight sky ...

No one has ever seen an electron. Its very existence has to be
inferred, and this by processes at once intricate and elaborate. So much,
then, for physical reality, that which we can touch and handle between
thumb and fingers. We must seek elsewhere.

Politics, too, has blown up. This was to be expected since political
government is a manifestation of the material world. By "politics"
understand "property," for government is the expressed pleasure of a
ruling class. In fact, property and theology may almost be said to have
been blown up in the same year, 1859, when Darwin published his Origin
of Species and Karl Marx his Critique of Political Economy. The
invention of machinery dating roughly from the late 18th century and
continuing in a steadily accelerating crescendo ever since, has made
inevitable the collectivization of our society - if our society do not
first eviscerate itself by turning these scientific techniques to lethal
weapons for mutual extermination. The airplane is symbol. At the turn of
the 19th century into the 20th, man for the first time built himself a
practicable pair of wings and learned to fly.

Our economic system, then, has blown up. Let me mention one simple
illustration. There was a politico-economic concept which was bound to
appear as the 19th century went on, and did in fact appear in the year
1870 during the Paris Commune after the defeat of France by the Prussians,
though for its full blooming it had to wait another forty-seven years,
until the Russian Revolution of 1917. I do not mean the March revolution
of that year, a Parliamentarian regime, - something quite respectable, of
the sort which might have happened at Philadelphia in 1776, on the 18th
century political model. (Here the gentlemen of the Glee Club laughed, it
seemed to me, not unsympathetically.) No. I mean the November revolution
of that same year, 1917, which sent a chill of fear up the spines of every
middle class on earth; November, 1917, when Lenin said, "Now,
comrades, we have a revolution!"

The English, American, and French political systems, being
predominantly agrarian in their origins, were based on territorial
representation. Machinery, by collectivizing industry, shifted the
industrial workers' grub-stake from the land to the machine. That concept
which I said was bound to appear as the Machine Age went on, was a shift
from territorial representation as your sole form of voting, to
occupational representation. What else is a labor union but voting in
accordance with one's occupation? Being asked one time to speak before an
irreproachable Rotary Club, I scandalized the brethren by pointing out to
them that their system of representation, one member each from a variety
of occupations, is in fact a Soviet. Being good Americans they laughed at
their own expense. Where your own sympathies lay with regard to Communism
I didn't know and was trying not to step on any toes. Since evidently I
haven't, let me go on and tell you something that - Col. Charles Erskine
Scott Wood, I think it was - said in the old Masses (it was then
being called The Liberator after Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist
paper): this was in 1919 or 1920. "I am accused of sympathy with the
Bolshevik Revolution," said he. "That is not true. When I see a sick souse
sitting on the railroad track and the Twentieth Century Limited coming
down the rails, my sympathies are not with the locomotive."

We come now to the one subject in our exploding world that is touchier
than property. That subject is sex. Sex has exploded. (Here again the
gentlemen of the Glee Club permitted themselves to laugh, and again, or so
it seemed to me, not unsympathetically.) Be that as it may ... you have
all probably heard of the late Dr. Sigmund Freud, sometime resident in
Vienna. How many present have seen either the play or the film, The
Barretts of Wimpole Street? ... Then I can illustrate the situation
quite simply from that. I went to see Miss Katharine Cornell play it at
the Shubert Theatre here in Boston innocently supposing that what I had
bought was an evening's entertainment. Pfouff! Bang! What I had
bought was a sociological cannon cracker. It went off in our faces. As the
performance went on, the tension in that audience was palpable, like an
emanation of psychic electricity. Others felt it too and spoke of it
afterwards. What that play did was confront the two generations, the
children of the two centuries: those who were young in the late 19th
century, and those who were young in the 20th: those who grew up before
the revolution which for want of a better word, though the word is
inadequate, we may call "Freudian," and those who have grown up since it
has had time to permeate; say 1914 to 1920. There we sat, both crops,
elbow-to-elbow, while the issues were being fought out on the stage before
us. Still in my innocence I supposed this play to be a legitimate subject
for polite discussion by mixed companies, parents and children, in urbane
households among the educated classes. I found it wasn't! In no time at
all, both sides were at it hammer and tongs, and both factions white with
anger. That play split hearthstones. And there was no telling which way a
given person would jump. Age was no determinant; neither was sex nor
previous condition of domestic servitude or felicity: the most unlikely
persons landed on the most improbable side, and landed with both feet. I
make no secret of where my own sympathies lie. They lie with your
generation. I grew up under that system of psychic terrorism, that
imposition of hush and taboo which flourished at its most ruthless in the
two decades before 1914; and no one could have loathed its falsehood, its
ignobility, more than I loathed it, and loathed it even as a boy. Your
generation may be forced to face death in battle anywhere from Europe to
Asia, but at least you have known what it is to call your souls your
own.

How the art-forms have exploded I need hardly remind you. Verse which
affects a cult of unintelligibility; painting so bizarre and eccentric as
to suggest the psychopathic; architecture harsh and bleak in its new
vestments of ferro-concrete; sculpture that is arthritic if not dropsical,
- though drama seems relatively immune from the extremities of this
nervous disorder; because, I suppose, if you bore your audience they walk
out. In music, written since 1926, much of that which I have heard I do
not understand. The deficiency may be entirely in myself, and yet most of
us know beauty when we hear it, for, to paraphrase Euripides, "Beauty is
that which when heard is loved." In contemporary writing, you know that
much of it is plumb illiterate. Illiterate, I mean, in the sense of the
higher uses of language. Some of this I attribute to the neglect of Greek
and Latin. Ignorant of the ancient languages, writers can not know their
own. They are as painters who never learned to draw; as sculptors who
never studied anatomy.

If I do not linger over this chaos in the art-forms, it is not because
the subject is unimportant, but because we are just now hunting bigger
game. In leaving it let me quote Mr. W. G. Constable, curator of paintings
at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Last autumn on a railway train coming
down from Vermont we met unexpectedly and had a leisurely afternoon as
seat-companions in which to thresh out this problem. We hammered it flat
and we hammered it round. At the end Mr. Constable remarked: "The artists
have their World Wars from ten to twenty years ahead of everybody
else."

* * *

Of the sea we expect instability; but when the ground trembles under
our feet our sensation of dismay is that the very earth has failed us.
Among all these earthquakes of our time, the most shattering is the
earthquake in religion. The first to feel it are those whom I call the
thinking classes. In periods of rapid change they are the first to outgrow
their traditional beliefs. This has happened more than once in recorded
history, but the classic instance is 5th century Athens. One can watch the
process from Aeschylus to Plato, from the victories over Persia to the
collapse of the Athenian Empire after the Peloponnesian War. It was at
first a period of rapid social development and ever widening diffusion of
knowledge. Myth and folklore are subjected to critical scrutiny; the
validity of religious beliefs and the authenticity of their moral mandates
are exposed to the challenge of philosophy and science. This procession of
beacon fires kindled from mountain peak to mountain peak of the Athenian
dramatists, historians, philosophers, and pioneers of science illumines
the Great Age. Aeschylus is passionately concerned with religion, now a
rebel against religious authority, as in Prometheus Bound, again on
the side of divine justice, as in the Oresteia; Sophocles is more
at ease in Zion, though still deeply concerned; Euripides, anxious and
unhappy over the clash between the old religion and the new epoch, makes
the Athenians so uncomfortable about it so often, that they finally drive
him out of their city into Macedon to write the Bacchae and to die.
Even Aristophanes, prince of comic dramatists though he is, returns again
and again to this collision between advanced ideas and inherited beliefs,
until we come to Thucydides and Plato, who knew quite well that they lived
in a disintegrating social system and asked themselves what they could
salvage from its best thinking which would be of worth to posterity. Our
present civilization, at its worthiest, is based largely on what they,
their colleagues, and their successors contrived to save. I know of no age
in which this recurrent crisis, when a thinking class is forced to move
beyond its traditional religion, was faced as honestly or met with a
wisdom equally fraught with value to the future of mankind.

Christianity arose among Galilean peasants who were never responsible
for maintaining a social system. Its precepts are personal. It arose
amongst a people devoid of the plastic arts. These were, in fact,
forbidden by their traditional religion. It arose amongst a people devoid
of science. That, too, would have been forbidden had they known what it
was. It arose amongst a pastoral people with next to no technology, yet
its mandates have lingered on into an age dominated by the impact of novel
scientific techniques. This conflict, this dichotomy in our spiritual
life, is felt by multitudes who do not know what it means and many of whom
are scandalized or terrified when its meaning is pointed out to them. I
cite you the experience of ancient Hellas because the Greeks are the only
people in the western world who ever created from the ground up a culture
of the grand scale, who ever faced with candor the problems incurred in so
doing, and bequeathed to us a heritage of thought and experience which may
see us through our own ordeal.

* * *

In a destructible world, where is something indestructible? Our sense
of beauty has not been repealed by the Machine Age. One form of beauty is
music. The paradox here is violent. What could be more fragile than music?
No sooner does it sound than it is gone; no sooner is it than it is not.
What is indestructible here? No one even knows what music is. It has never
been seen by human eye any more than an electron has been seen. Perhaps
both are of the same stuff and perhaps their texture is the ultimate stuff
of being - a mere rate of vibration. You who in youth have enjoyed the
inestimable privilege of access to an art-form as participant performers
in works of genius form an audience to whom I can speak freely, and that
is why I am here, for you, whether aware of it or not, have had the
experiences to which these ideas can be addressed. How often, as I have
heard and watched you and your predecessors sing the choral parts of
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony or his Missa Solemnis, or Bach's
B-Minor Mass or Matthew Passion Music, or Brahms'
Requiem[1], how often have I
reflected, "To have sung this music with a virtuoso orchestra and in
youth must be one of the decisive events in a lifetime. A man would be
one person before it; he would be another ever afterward. For no one
need tell him that a world of the creative spirit exists. He has lived
in it. He knows."

Music is a form of religious meditation. It clears the mind, cleanses
the heart, stills the chatterbox of trivial ideas, and fortifies the will.
These men of genius who compose the masterworks of musical literature are
able to carry us on voyages of discovery over vast interior seas to the
empurpled shores of strange continents which we never could have found for
ourselves and which perhaps they could never find for us a second
time,

But we have felt the good ship riding free

And watched the dawn on purple islands break.

You must know from your own experience of music how it fructifies one's
creative impulses. It kindles in us something akin to that which is first
kindled in its composer and performers. Everything is in it from tears to
laughter, from flesh to spirit, from revelry to worship. You are men; I
will say it. Everything is in music from the sexual orgasm to the noblest
aspirations of mankind, and every note in that infinite scale can be
harmonious, beautiful and ennobling.

These are the inner sonorities. You know that in listening to music, as
you hear the same work repeatedly until it is so familiar that you know
what is coming from measure to measure and from note to note, the themes
or tunes are the first elements which your memory retains. After that, the
harmonization, the instrumental color, the inner voices. As these repeated
hearings go on, first the themes are relegated to the unconscious part of
one's attention: you know those anyhow, your ear hears them without
trying, and it is more interesting to listen to the harmonic structure
into which these themes have been wrought by an artifex maximus -
like looking at the setting instead of at the gem which shines with such
lustre that eyes take that in without effort. Finally, when both the
themes and structure are so firmly grasped as no longer to need conscious
attention, the ear turns to the inner sonorities of the music. These are
the distinctive quality, the unique and peculiar texture of tone which can
now at last speak to the imagination directly. They are perhaps what in
its final essence the music is, that which the composer felt most deeply
when creating it, perhaps so deeply that he was not aware of feeling it at
all. These inner sonorities could have been apprehended only by his inner
ear, the ear of his imagination. The excitation of imaginary images which
they arouse in the listener is utterly unpredictable, is seldom if ever
the same for any two persons among thousands, and even for the individual
may vary from one performance to another, though they may also be
sufficiently vivid the first time to become fixed with each repetition.
Again, these imaginary images may seem, or be, totally irrelevant to the
music. The composer has no power to govern their effects; he looses these
sounds and they produce whatsoever effects they may on the listener
according to his capacities. These inner sonorities convey the deepest
part of his consciousness to the deepest part of ours; they are abstract,
amoral, and, like other elemental forces of nature, quite indifferent to
our formal categories.

And yet they are related to the conduct of life - are themselves the
conduct of life. A man's thoughts and acts are his thematic material
(tunes) and harmonization; his development from childhood to maturity as a
human being is the Durchführung, the working-out of his themes in
sonata form, the same tunes often recurring, deepened and enriched; but
the abstruse inner sonorities of him are the sum of what he has
experienced, endured, conquered, lost, survived, outgrown, matured into
... Actually that part of him which most weighs, most prevails, most goes
forth into other lives, is this unconscious cumulative self of him all
that he has fought through, most of it so long ago that he has forgotten.
It is this which makes him what he is: he is unaware of it: those who feel
it and respond do not know what this substance is, but they do know that
something is there. These are his inner sonorities, the ultimate music of
his being, the full flower of his life as an art-form, and, like the inner
sonorities of great music, they have passed out of their creator's custody
and beyond his control. They move freely among other human beings to
produce in them, not predictable results, but whatsoever responses those
human beings are attuned to resonate. Tolstoy found in Beethoven's
Kreutzer Sonata a novel of homicidal sexuality: others find in it
only the noblest aspirations of their own souls. In these higher voltages
of the spirit one is creating at levels both above and below the
consciously worded thought or the consciously planned act. The totality of
him goes forth and exerts itself on the totality of other personalities.
They will respond at that level to which they are attuned. Perhaps this is
what we mean when we say that we are not influenced by what a man says, or
even by what he does, but by what he is. What he is is this totality of
his being, expressed like music through his inner sonorities.

* * *

We live in a destructible world, yet somehow we must go on building. An
ancient myth says that Amphion had a golden lyre given him by Hermes to
whose strains the stones of Thebes rose one above another until the city
walls were built. Not only must the city walls of world security, if
possible, be built; some edifice of the spirit must be built also and
built by us to house the soul of man in an epoch to come. That will be the
labor of many brains and many hands, yet the spirit of man is not many but
one, and its inner sonorities are a golden lyre which can cause the very
stones to stir at the touch of Amphion, son of Zeus. For we are all sons
of Zeus in that we are all created to be creators.

* * *

One summer in the 1930's being in Europe I went up to Finland to see
Dr. Sibelius. He was most gracious and we had long conversations. As you
probably know, he lives about twenty-five miles outside of Helsinki at a
place called Järvenpää,which means "Lake's End." One can go out from the
capital by a little train in about an hour, or by motor car in less. His
villa is built of logs and stands on a knoll among pines and silver
birches overlooking the lake to the westward. At the foot of this knoll
but still in the grove is an assemblage of heavy out-of-door wooden chairs
around a table, all of them painted white, and down here one sunny
afternoon late in August Mme Sibelius had the coffee service carried. The
lake glittered under a westering sun and in the meadow close at hand
peasants were reaping golden rye. In Finland the age of myth and legend is
still just around the corner and doors stand open to the great winds which
blow from the past out of the Kalevala, the Sagas and the Edda. let me
give you an idea of how close it is. That evening these same peasants were
cooking their supper over a fire of twigs on a raised, open hearth. The
hearth was like the one you see on the stage in Act I of Wagner's Die
Walküre.

Dr. Sibelius had put on his white suit and that broad-brimmed,
flat-crowned hat of tan felt which so often appears in his photographs. He
was in high spirits and conversation was lively. It was about history,
literature, music, philosophy, ethics, the daemonic element in the
creative process, and a good deal else which I have never felt at liberty
to repeat. He also talked to Goethe, Byron, Wagner, Ibsen, Emerson,
Brahms, of his own preference in working hours, of what to do when the
spring refuses to flow, and about his relationships with his publishers --
Then of a sudden he was speaking of Beethoven, and of a sudden I realized
that he was speaking of that andante cantabile, the slow movement
of the B-flat Trio. He stopped speaking and began to sing. It was as
though the composer, impatient of words, had found speech an impertinence
in the presence of such music. The conversation ceased while he sang the
theme through to its end. Then he resumed: "And it does not end ... The
variations go on until they seem to merge into a purple horizon, and
vanish."

How often since then in these dreary war-years, I have thought of him
at Järvenpää, burdened with his share of his nation's and the world's
grief. But I have thought also that, knowing and loving that trio of
Beethoven, and having composed perhaps as great music of his own, he too
must know, and far better than you or I, that although this world may be
no great shakes, the future problematical, and no telling what may become
of us, one thing is certain - so long as there is such music in the world,
there is always something we can do about the worst that the world can do
to us.

For eternal life is not a duration; it is an intensity.

Copyright 1945, Lucien Price

[1] Beauty of form may outlast acceptability of content. It is not likely
that the monkish copyists found themselves completely in agreement with
the comedies of Aristophanes or even with all of the Dialogues of Plato
and yet these MSS survived the Middle Ages, and today the Mediaeval
cathedrals make a profound aesthetic impression on those who find the
theological concepts which are supposed to have inspired them abhorrent.
The same may be true of music written to Biblical or missal texts.
Aesthetic perceptions would appear to be more durable than ethical
concepts.