Review

Author(s): E. B.
Review by: E. B.
Source: Music & Letters, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Apr., 1948), pp. 188-189
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/730893
Accessed: 30-03-2015 02:19 UTC

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I88 MUSIC AND LETTERS

A few mistakes should in any case be rectified in future editions.

On p. I9 Ravel is said to have been living at Montfort l'Amoury (sic)
between I908-14, when he actually moved to Montfort l'Amaury in
1920-2 . The Russian dancer Truhanova appears as Truharova on
p. 23. The second sentence on p. 45 would lead the casual reader to
suppose that Faure died in I937, though he actually died thirteen years
earlier; and on p. 72 the Ct in the second bar of the quotation from
'Ondine' should-at least according to my copy-be C$.
M. D. P. C.

Albert Roussel: a Study. By Norman Demuth. pp. I5I. (United Music

Publishers, London, 1947.) Ios. 6d.
It is good to have a book on Roussel in English at last. Anything that
will help to make an admirable French composer better known to British
music-lovers, and perhaps even to British audiences, is to be welcomed.
True, Mr. Demuth overdoes defiant championship a little: one does not
want to be bullied into liking Roussel's music, or anyone else's. Much less
does one wish to be persuaded that, in order to care for Roussel, one must
needs first give up cherishing some other composer, sometimes, though
Mr. Demuth would no doubt hotly deny this, after all greater than his
hero of the moment. (I say " of the moment ". because it was Ravel a
little while ago and will be, I hear, Franck before we know where we
are.)
If we refuse to accept Roussel at Mr. Demuth's valuation, we may still
be grateful to him for doing a great deal to help us in revising and
clarifying our own. His book is certainly stimulating, if only in the way
of taking us roughly by the scruff of the neck and shaking us vigorously
until we have no energy left to argue. Unfortunately this method of
persuasion, effective enough in its way, rather fails here because it is too
wildly unsuited to the matter about which we are to be persuaded. We
may not agree with Mr. Demuth, for instance, that Roussel was a fine
melodist-not a single one of the fifty-four musical quotations confirms
that view-but whatever Roussel's shortcomings, he was a very fastidious
and precise artist who knew what he wanted to say and said it in exactly
the way his good judgment dictated. He would have been utterly
incapable of setting down the musical equivalents of the kind of loose
writing that mars Mr. Demuth's book all over. He would have died, or
at least given up composition and gone back into naval service, rather
than say in French music anything like " the crowning blow ", " hotly
followed by the fourth Symphony ", " the truth of the schoolboy's remark
that ' it only goes to show ' ", " smacks largely of the brains rather than
the heart ", " for once a romance [meaning a fib] was excusable ", " a
strong savour of leg-pulling ", "points a new angle on tragedy" or
"with an unmistakable hall-mark to afford a completely different
picture of French music from the one usually rather loosely in vogue ".
These are, so to speak, the consecutive octaves in Mr. Demuth's prose,
and if one thing is certain about Roussel's music, it is that, whatever he
,may have committed to paper (even octaves, perhaps where they suited
him), it was never solecisms of that kind. Nor would he have avoided
one clumsiness by falling into another, as Mr. Demuth does when he
says of Ravel's G major piano Concerto that " he deliberately wrote it

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 REVIEWS OF BOOKS I89

for, as against, the piano ", which is obviously an escape fiom " wrote
itfor, as against against, the piano ", and no better in its way.
Faults of style in Mr. Demuth are aggravated by faults of taste of a
kind even more unthinkable in Roussel, who was not always inspired
and could sometimes be dry or cold, but never dragged into any work
things not relevant to its thought and manner. Mr. Demuth flies off at
tangents, especially into would-be interesting or amusing observations
addressed exclusively to English readers, which are extravagantly out of
place in a discussion of a French composer and his work. One has only
to imagine a French translation of his book to see at once how ill-fitting
things like the following quotations look:
. .. he entered the College at Tourcoing, studying rhetoric-French educational
ideas are not the same as ours.
. . no transport was available. The Englishman [Ramsay MacDonald] came to
the rescue and invited them to share his; this consisted, believe it or not, of two
horses and an elephant (a situation worthy only of Noel Coward!). [Why " only ",
and why Noel Coward at all?]
The spider is more triumphant than villainous and we never feel that we are in
the presence of the Sweeney Todd of the work. [' Le Festin de l'araignee.']

All this is inartistic, to say the least, and since that is precisely what
Roussel never was, whatever other fault may be found with his work,
there is a grievous disparity between Mr. Demuth's book and its subject
which sets an uncomfortable barrier between his plea and its cause.
With the matter of the book, as distinct from the manner, there is
very little fault to be found. True, when Mr. Demuth says of
'Padmavati' that it is "no exaggeration to suggest that reasoned
history [what is reasoned history, by the way?] may well rate it of an
importance on a level with Wagner ", one may think that he might have
been content with the suggestion and have left it to others to decide
whether it was exaggerated; and when he declares that the ' Evocations '
should be considered as seriously as " the symphonies of Beethoven and
Brahms ", one may be excused for pausing a long time to consider such
a statement, quite apart from the question whether the time has not gone
by for considering Brahms in the same way as Beethoven. But these are
matters of opinion, and when it comes to that, there is no occasion to
quarrel with Mr. Demuth, though one may not always agree with him.
He states a case and he defends it generously. Thus, if one reads his
pages with some irritation at their carelessness and jauntiness, one is
also moved to give them serious attention for their sincerity and thorough-
ness. The detailed discussions of Roussel's works may not be tempting
to read word for word, but they are well done and very useful for reference,
and it is good to find nothing that matters left undiscussed. The
enthusiasm, if a little indiscreet, is infectious, and one heartily agrees
with many of Mr. Demuth's judgments, including that which decides
that Roussel is never common, though one may feel inclined to add that
he is never very human either. For commonness is a human thing, and
to remember that is to go some way towards excusing this author's
unsuitably coarse way of writing, which gives the impression that,
offering us a dish of peaches, he at the same time hands us a hatchet
with which to peel them.
E. B.

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