December 12
Went to the Queen’s Hall, sat in the Orchestra and watched Sir Henry’s statuesque figure conducting through a forest of bows, “which pleased me mightily.” He would be worth watching if you were stone deaf. If you could not hear a sound, the animation and excitement of an orchestra in full swing, with the conductor cutting and slashing at invisible foes, make a magnificent spectacle.
The face of Sir Henry Wood strikes me as very much like the traditional pictures of Jesus Christ, though Sir Henry is dark—the melanic Messiah I call him (very much to my own delight). Rodin ought to do him in stone—Chesterfield’s ideal of a man—a Corinthian edifice on Tuscan foundations. In Sir Henry’s case there can be no disputing the Tuscan foundations. However swift and elegant the movements of his arms, his splendid lower extremities remain as firm as stone columns. While the music is calm and serene his right hand and baton execute in concert with the left, perfect geometric curves around his head. Then as it gathers in force and volume, when the bows begin to dart swiftly across the fiddles and the trumpets and trombones blaze away in a conflagration, we are all expectant—and even a little fearful, to observe his sabre-like cuts. The tension grows … I hold my breath. … Sir Henry snatches a second to throw back a lock of his hair that has fallen limply across his forehead, then goes on in unrelenting pursuit, cutting and slashing at hordes of invisible fiends that leap howling out towards him. There is a great turmoil of combat, but the Conductor struggles on till the great explosion happens. But in spite of that, you see him still standing through a cloud of great chords, quite undaunted. His sword zigzags up and down the scale—suddenly the closed fist of his left hand shoots up straight and points to the zenith—like the arm of a heathen priest appealing to Baal to bring down fire from Heaven. … But the appeal avails nought and it looks as though it were all up for poor Sir Henry. The music is just as infuriated—his body writhes with it—the melanic Messiah crucified by the inappeasable desire to express by visible gestures all that he feels in his heart. He surrenders—so you think—he opens out both arms wide and baring his breast, dares them all to do their worst—like the picture of Moffat the missionary among the savages of the Dark Continent!
And yet he wins after all. At the very last moment he seems to summon all his remaining strength and in one final and devastating sweep mows down the orchestra rank by rank. … You awake from the nightmare to discover the victor acknowledging the applause in a series of his inimitable bows.
One ought to pack one’s ears up with cotton wool at a concert where Sir Henry conducts. Otherwise, the music is apt to distract one’s attention. R. L. S. wanted to be at the head of a cavalry charge—sword over head—but I’d rather fight an orchestra with a baton.
This symphony always works me up into an ecstasy; in ecstatic sympathy with its dreadfulness I could stand up in the balcony and fling myself down passionately into the arena below. Yet there were women sitting alongside me today—knitting! It so annoyed and irritated me that at the end of the first movement I got up and sat elsewhere. They would have sat knitting at the foot of the Cross, I suppose.
At the end of the second movement, two or three other women got up and went home to tea! It would have surprised me no more to have seen a cork extract itself from its bottle and promenade.
Just lately I’ve heard a lot of music including Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique and Fifth Symphonies, some Debussy, and odd pieces by Dukas, Glinka, Smetana, Mozart. I am chock-full of impressions of all this precious stuff and scarcely know what to write. As usual, the third movement of the Pathétique produced a frenzy of exhilaration; I seemed to put on several inches around my chest and wished to shout in a voice of thunder. The conventions of a public concert hall are dreadfully oppressive at such times. I could have eaten “all the elephants of Hindustan and picked my teeth with the spire of Strasbourg Cathedral.”
In the last movement of the Fifth Symphony of that splendid fellow Tchaikovsky, the orchestra seemed to gallop away leaving poor Landon Ronald to wave his whip in a ridiculously ineffective way. They went on crashing down chords, and just before the end I had the awful presentiment that the orchestra simply could not stop. I sat still straining every nerve in the expectancy that this chord or the next or the next was the end. But it went on pounding down—each one seemed the last but every time another followed as passionate and emphatic as the one before, until finally, whatever this inhuman orchestra was attempting to crush and destroy must have been reduced to shapeless pulp. I wanted to board the platform and plead with them, elderly gentlemen turned their heads nervously, everyone was breathless, we all wanted to call “For God’s sake, stop”—to do anything to still this awful lust for annihilation. … The end came quickly in four drum beats in quick succession. I have never seen such hate, such passionate intensity of the will to destroy. … And Tchaikovsky was a Russian!
Debussy was a welcome change. “L’Après-midi d’un Faun” is a musical setting to an oscitatory exercise. It is an orchestral yawn. Oh! so tired!
Came away thoroughly delighted. Wanted to say to everyone “Bally good, ain’t it?” and then we would all shake hands and go home whistling.