The Miracle of Inspiration

by Henry T. Finck

The immortal song writer, Robert Franz, was deaf when I called on him one summer day, not long before his death, and I had to write on a slate what I wanted to say to him. He was able to talk, however, and he did so eloquently, telling me many things of interest which I used in an article for The Century Magazine. One of his idols was Handel; he talked about him, and about others, and to illustrate a point he got up and brought from his library the manuscript score of one of Handels many works - I forget which. Turning over the pages, he pointed laughingly at the evidence here and there, of the rapidity with which Handel had worked. In those days sand was used instead of blotting paper, and here and there grains of sand where to be seen on the top of the page, showing that Handel must have reached the end of that page before the ink on the first staves was dry.

"The Messiah" and Bach

Handel's greatest work, "The Messiah", must have been written at this lightning speed. He began it on August 22, 1741, and finished the orchestration of the third part on September 14. That is, he composed this wonderful work in twenty-three days! The achievement is the more remarkable when we bear in mind that he was at this time fifty-six years old - sixteen years beyond the age at which Dr. Osler intimated that men do their best work.

A book was written not long ago in which it was shown that in his oratorios, as in his operas, Handel did not hesitate to introduce numbers from his own older works, as well as whole pages from the compositions of other men, without quotation marks. There are such things in "The Messiah", but not enough of them to diminish the miracle of its rapid creation. The manuscript of this oratorio is written on oblong folio paper, 9 3/4 by 12 inches, and it fills 275 of these pages. Merely to copy that number in three weeks would be, I should think, a creditable achievement.

Handel's great contemporary, J.S. Bach, seldom repeated himself, and he never borrowed from others; yet his writings full nearly half a hundred huge folio volumes, including several hundred cantatas, some of which must have been composed as fast as many of Handel's scores. He was much addicted to revising; but the composition itself was the inspiration of the moment, revision being merely the varnish. To be sure, sometimes the varnish is of prime importance - think of Japanese lacquer articles, or our Rookwood pottery!

In the case of Bach's inspiration the most miraculous thing is its prophetic quality, so to speak; that is, its anticipation of the future development of music. When Professor Paine told me, at Harvard University, in 1875, that there was hardly a harmony in Wagner which could not be found in Bach, I attributed his remark to his indisposition to acknowledge Wagner's greatness; but he was right. Bach had the harmonies, but we use them more boldly, with stronger accents and without preparation. To me the most astonishing thing about Bach has always seemed his skill in using harsh dissonances without violating the pedantic rules of his time. Herein he shows a diabolical ingenuity.

Mozart a Worker

It is commonly assumed that Mozart was all inspiration and no work. That was not his own view of the case. When his "Don Giovanni" was being rehearsed at Prague, in 1787, he said to the conductor; "It is a mistake to think that the practice of my art has become easy to me. I assure you, dear friend, no one has given so much care to the study of composition as I. There is scarcely a famous master in music whose works I have not frequently and diligently studied."

To his father he once wrote; "You know that, so to speak, I am wrapped up in music - that I practice it all day long - that I like to speculate, study, reflect."

He could compose amid the most unfavorable surroundings. "Above us is a violinist", he once wrote from Milan to his sister, "below us is another, next door a singing teacher who gives lessons, and in the last room opposite ours an oboeist. Merry conditions for composing," he adds sarcastically. "You get so many ideas!"

Where he really got his ideas was in the open air; that supplied the ozone necessary for his inspirational faculty to get active. He could do more in a few days working in a garden than in as many days working in a room. New ideas were very apt to come into his mind when he was traveling. These he jotted down on slips of paper which he preserved in a leather bag made for this purpose and which he carefully guarded. These germs he then elaborated in his mind, turning them over and over till he was satisfied. His biographer, Jahn, places much emphasis on the amount of preliminary labor Mozart expended on his operas before he put them on paper.

Everybody has read that he postponed writing the overture to "Don Giovanni" until the midnight preceding the evening of the day when that opera had its first performance; and that at seven in the morning the score was ready for the copyist. His wife had helped to keep him awake by telling him funny stories. That he was able to do this was of course due to the fact that the overture was ready in his head will all the details of orchestration, and that all that he had to accomplish was the mechanical work of writing it out.

This was not one isolated instance. It was, in fact, Mozart's habit to delay putting his music on paper, because the process of writing did not interest him as much as the creating and composing, which were done in his head before the hands got busy. "Like Beethoven, he walked up and down the room, absorbed in thought, even while washing his hands; and his hairdresser used to complain that Mozart would never sit still, but would jump up every now and then and walk across the room to jot down something, or touch the piano, while he had to run after him, holding on to his pigtail.

Beethoven's Slow Method

Like Mozart, Beethoven got most of his ideas in the open air, on his walks; and he jotted them down in sketch books, which fortunately have been preserved. Were we to judge by these sketches alone, we might doubt whether Beethoven was inspired, in the usual meaning of the term. The dictionary defines "inspired" as "informed, instructed, or controlled by divine influence", and we usually speak of original ideas as coming "from above". But these Beethoven sketches are for the most part so ordinary that one need not look for a divine origin for them.

Wherein Beethoven revealed his rare genius was in the altering of these commonplace sketches till they gradually assumed the aspect of inspirational products. In the "Fidelio" sketch book, for example, there are sixteen pages of sketches for music which, when finally written out, made up less than three pages of the vocal score. Of one air there are eighteen versions, of one chorus ten. In the words of Thayer; "To follow a recitative or aria through all its guises is an extremely fatiguing task, and the almost countless studies for a duet or terset are enough to make one frantic".

The wonderful results Beethoven achieved by this slow method prove that rapidity of work is not a test of musical inspiration. His sketches - his first ideas - were to him what  a rough block of marble is to a sculptor who gradually chisels it into a beautiful statue.

There are many writers who have no definite idea of what they are going to say when they take up the pen. Ideas come to them as they write; their brain needs to be heated by the exercise of forming sentences before it emits flashes of genius.

Schubert's Amazing Facility

Sir George Grove was right in saying that it seems as if in Schubert's piece "the stream from the heavenly reservoir were dashing over us, or flowing through us, more directly, with less admixture of any medium or channel, than it does those of any other writer, even of Beethoven himself."

Schubert was not an uncritical as is commonly supposed. He rewrote a considerable number of his songs, some of them two or three times, and he knew how to file and polish. If he filed and polished less than Beethoven and other masters, that was because there was no need of it. He never had to change his ideas; his melodies, utterly unlike Beethoven's, sprang from his brain as finished products; he had no need to sketch books; neither he nor anyone else could have improved the themes as they came from his brain.

The elaboration or development was as spontaneous as the conception of the theme. As we write letters when we are in the mood for it, so did Schubert compose pieces and songs, as fast as his pen could travel. It was his habit to put on each manuscript the day - sometimes even the hour - of its beginning and its completion. This made it possible to test the rapidity of his work. An expert copyist once tried in how short a time he could copy one of the Schubert chamber works - I think it was a quintet; he found it took him just as long as it had taken the composer to create it! Of all the miracles of inspiration this is the greatest.

Everyone has heard how Schubert wrote one of his finest songs, "Hark, Hark, The Lark". He was waiting with some friends at a suburban tavern for lunch when he saw a volume of poems, and, picking it up, came across the Shakespeare verses. He had hardly read them when he exclaimed; "Oh, if I only had some music paper to jot down the lovely melody that has just come into my head". There was no such paper, but one of the friends quickly drew some staves on the back of the bill of fare, and then and there Schubert improvised his immortal song. There is reason to believe that he wrote that other gem, "Sylvia", the same day.

Schubert could not only, like Dr. Johnson, "tear the heart out of a book," he could change it instantly to music. Indeed, as Schumann remarked, "everything he touched turned into music"; and Grove aptly speaks of "the almost fierce eagerness with which he attacked his poetry, and of the inspiration with which the music rushed from his heart and through the pen."

The greatest of Schubert's songs - that is, the greatest of all songs - are those contained in the "Winter Journey" cycle; and of these, six were composed in one morning.

Inspiration knows no law. At one time extremely coy and elusive, it comes at other moments unbidden. Not infrequently a happy thought came to Schubert when he was lying in bed. He would then jump up and jot it down instantly; and as he was very nearsighted he kept on his spectacles at night, to be prepared for any call.

The workings of such a brain - could we but understand it! Schubert's friends were puzzled by this phenomenon. They noted his states of "fine frenzy", and their amazing results - results as puzzling to himself as to others. They looked on his performance as acts done in a state of clairvoyance, as well they might, for he seemed in a trance when he wrote, and at times knew not himself afterwards what he had done. Sometimes he forgot his own songs. One day the tenor Vogel sang one of these, and when he got through Schubert exclaimed: "That's not bad! Who wrote it?"

By Schubert's early death the musical world lost the most marvelously constructed brain that ever existed. Had he lived a decade or two longer, how many more inspired thoughts would have come to us through it from the heavenly reservoir which so few, alas, are able to tap?

Chopin's Way and Schumann's

Chopin was like Schubert, inasmuch as his inspirations were usually perfect as they first came to him. Yet he was so critical that he would fain have improved them. On this point George Sand tells us that "he shut himself up in his room for entire days, weeping, walking about, breaking his pen, repeating and changing a bar a hundred times, and beginning again next day with minute and desperate perseverance. He spent six weeks over a single page, only to go back and write that which he had traced the first essay".

Concerning his inspiration, the same writer tells us that "it descended upon his piano suddenly, completely, sublimely, or it sang itself in his head during his walks, and he made haste to hear it by rushing to the instrument". Having such absorbing thoughts in his head naturally made him absentminded, to such a degree that he sometimes narrowly escaped being run over by a carriage. Sometimes he forgot his meals. When improvising at the piano he was equally oblivious of his surroundings. He did not watch the keyboard, we are told, but generally gazed at the ceiling.

George Sand had many opportunities to listen to his inspired improvisations, and she wished there were a way of fixing them. Today we have such a way - but we have no Chopin!

Schumann was not one of the rapid writers, anymore than Chopin or Beethoven. He worked hard over his tasks, but the results were usually of permanent value, until incipient mental disease changed him from a man of genius to a man of talent.

During the first decade of his creative career he wrote for the pianoforte only. In a letter to a friend he said: "You ought to write more for the voice. Or are you, perhaps, like myself, who have all my life placed vocal music below instrumental, and never considered it a great art?" He seemed to feel that this was a wrong attitude, for he adds; "But don't speak to anyone about this."

A year later he had changed his views and practices completely. "At present I compose only vocal pieces", he wrote. "I can hardly tell you what a delight it is to write for the voice as compared with instruments, and how it throbs and rages within me when I am at work. Entirely new things have been revealed to me, and I am thinking of writing an opera, which, however, will not be possible until I have entirely freed myself from editorial work."

It was at this time that he became temporarily as fluent a writer as Schubert. It was the year when his long engagement to Clara Wieck terminated in marriage, and he was so overflowing with happiness that he wrote in that one year over a hundred songs, including nearly all of his best ones.

Love and Patriotism

While we cannot fathom the mystery of musical inspiration, we can not its sources. Love of woman is the chief of them. Love helped Schumann to write his best songs. It helped other masters in the same way, including Beethoven, who was never married but often in love with the pretty countesses and less exalted girls he gave lessons to. Gruff though he was as a rule, he could turn a neat compliment. One evening at a party he took his sketch book from his pocket repeatedly and wrote some bars in it. Afterwards, when alone with Frau von Arnim, he sang for her what he had written, and said: "There, how does that sound? It is yours if you like it; I made it for you, you inspired me with it; I saw it in your eyes."

It is always under the influence of strong feeling that inspired thoughts come to a musician. It may be love of woman, love of music itself, love of one's own country, or some other variety of devotion. Patriotism is responsible for many master creations. Grieg was not a rapid worker as a rule, but under the stress of deep feeling he, too achieved remarkable feats in this line. When I was writing my book on "Songs and Song Writers" I asked him to give me some information regarding his songs, and after some hesitation he complied, writing me an autobiographic sketch of more than thirty pages. One of the most interesting pages in this letter was the following:

"In the Album vol. IV we breathe the air of my native country. In these songs, which differ from all the preceding ones, I struck a tone of Norwegian Volksthumlichkeit which was new at the time. I was all aflame with enthusiasm when I became acquainted, in the spring of 1880, with the poems of Vinje, which embody a deep philosophy of life, and in course of eight to ten days I composed not only the songs contained in the fourth volume, but others by the same poet which are not yet in print. A.O. Vinje was a peasant by birth. He attempted with his prose works to enlighten the Norwegian people; and these writings, together with his poems, gave him a great national importance."

The Etude Magazine August 1909