Читать книгу: «The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863», страница 14
SOMETHING LEFT UNDONE
Labor with what zeal we will,
Something still remains undone,
Something, uncompleted still,
Waits the rising of the sun.
By the bedside, on the stair,
At the threshold, near the gates,
With its menace or its prayer,
Like a mendicant it waits:
Waits, and will not go away,—
Waits, and will not be gainsaid.
By the cares of yesterday
Each to-day is heavier made,
Till at length it is, or seems,
Greater than our strength can bear,—
As the burden of our dreams,
Pressing on us everywhere;
And we stand from day to day
Like the dwarfs of times gone by,
Who, as Northern legends say,
On their shoulders held the sky.
THE GREAT INSTRUMENT
Early in the month of November the mysterious curtain which has hidden the work long in progress at the Boston Music Hall will be lifted, and the public will throng to look upon and listen to the GREAT ORGAN.
It is the most interesting event in the musical history of the New World. The masterpiece of Europe's master-builder is to uncover its veiled front and give voice to its long-brooding harmonies. The most precious work of Art that ever floated from one continent to the other is to be formally displayed before a great assembly. The occasion is one of well-earned rejoicing, almost of loud triumph; for it is the crowning festival which rewards an untold sum of devoted and conscientious labor, carried on, without any immediate recompense, through a long series of years, to its now perfect consummation. The whole community will share in the deep satisfaction with which the public-spirited citizens who have encouraged this noble undertaking, and the enterprising; and untiring lover of science and art who has conducted it from the first, may look upon their completed task.
What is this wondrous piece of mechanism which has cost so much time and money, and promises to become one of the chief attractions of Boston and a source of honest pride to all cultivated Americans? The organ, as its name implies, is the instrument, in distinction from all other and less noble instruments. We might almost think it was called organ as being a part of an unfinished organism, a kind of Frankenstein-creation, half framed and half vitalized. It breathes like an animal, but its huge lungs must be filled and emptied by alien force. It has a wilderness of windpipes, each furnished with its own vocal adjustment, or larynx. Thousands of long, delicate tendons govern its varied internal movements, themselves obedient to the human muscles which are commanded by the human brain, which again is guided in its volitions by the voice of the great half-living creature. A strange cross between the form and functions of animated beings, on the one hand, and the passive conditions of inert machinery, on the other! Its utterance rises through all the gamut of Nature's multitudinous voices, and has a note for all her outward sounds and inward moods. Its thunder is deep as that of billows that tumble through ocean-caverns, and its whistle is sharper than that of the wind through their narrowest crevice. It roars louder than the lion of the desert, and it can draw out a thread of sound as fine as the locust spins at hot noon on his still tree-top. Its clustering columns are as a forest in which every music-flowering tree and shrub finds its representative. It imitates all instruments; it cheats the listener with the sound of singing choirs; it strives for a still purer note than can be strained from human throats, and emulates the host of heaven with its unearthly "voice of angels." Within its breast all the passions of humanity seem to reign in turn. It moans with the dull ache of grief, and cries with the sudden thrill of pain; it sighs, it shouts, it laughs, it exults, it wails, it pleads, it trembles, it shudders, it threatens, it storms, it rages, it is soothed, it slumbers.
Such is the organ, man's nearest approach to the creation of a true organism.
But before the audacious conception of this instrument ever entered the imagination of man, before he had ever drawn a musical sound from pipe or string, the chambers where the royal harmonies of his grandest vocal mechanism were to find worthy reception were shaped in his own marvellous structure. The organ of hearing was finished by its Divine Builder while yet the morning stars sang together, and the voices of the young creation joined in their first choral symphony. We have seen how the mechanism of the artificial organ takes on the likeness of life; we shall attempt to describe the living organ in common language by the aid of such images as our ordinary dwellings furnish us. The unscientific reader need not take notice of the words in parentheses.
The annexed diagram may render it easier to follow the description.
The structure which is to admit Sound as a visitor is protected and ornamented at its entrance by a light movable awning (the external ear). Beneath and within this opens a recess or passage, (meatus auditorium externus,) at the farther end of which is the parchment-like front-door, D (membrana tympani).
Beyond this is the hall or entry, H, (cavity of the tympanum,) which has a ventilator, V, (Eustachian tube,) communicating with the outer air, and two windows, one oval, o, (fenestra ovalis,) one round, r, (fenestra rotunda,) both filled with parchment-like membrane, and looking upon the inner suite of apartments (labyrinth).
This inner suite of apartments consists of an antechamber, A, (vestibule,) an arched chamber, B, (semicircular canals,) and a spiral chamber, S, (cochlea,) with a partition, P, dividing it across, except for a small opening at one end. The antechamber opens freely into the arched chamber, and into one side of the partitioned spiral chamber. The other side of this spiral chamber looks on the hall by the round window already mentioned; the oval window looking on the hall belongs to the antechamber. From the front-door to the oval window of the antechamber extends a chain, c, (ossicula auditûs,) so connected that a knock on the first is transmitted instantly to the second. But as the round window of the spiral chamber looks into the hall, the knock at the front-door will also make itself heard at and through that window, being conveyed along the hall.
In each division of the inner suite of apartments are the watchmen, (branches of the auditory nerve,) listening for the approach of Sound. The visitor at length enters the porch, and knocks at the front-door. The watchmen in the antechamber hear the blow close to them, as it is repeated, through the chain, on the window of their apartment. The impulse travels onward into the arched chamber, and startles its tenants. It is transmitted into one half of the partitioned spiral chamber, and rouses the recumbent guardians in that apartment. Some portion of it even passes the small opening in the partition, and reaches the watchmen in the other half of the room. But they also hear it through the round window, not as it comes through the chain, but as it resounds along the hall.
Thus the summons of Sound reaches all the watchmen, but not all of them through the same channels or with the same force. It is not known how their several precise duties are apportioned, but it seems probable that the watchmen in the spiral chamber observe the pitch of the audible impulse which reaches them, while the others take cognizance of its intensity and perhaps of its direction.
Such is the plan of the organ of hearing as an architect might describe it. But the details of its special furnishing are so intricate and minute that no anatomist has proved equal to their entire and exhaustive delineation. An Italian nobleman, the Marquis Corti, has hitherto proved most successful in describing the wonderful key-board found in the spiral chamber, the complex and symmetrical beauty of which is absolutely astonishing to those who study it by the aid of the microscope. The figure annexed shows a small portion of this extraordinary structure. It is from Kölliker's well-known work on Microscopic Anatomy.
Enough has been said to show that the ear is as carefully adjusted to respond to the blended impressions of sound as the eye to receive the mingled rays of light; and that as the telescope presupposes the lens and the retina, so the organ presupposes the resonant membranes, the labyrinthine chambers, and the delicately suspended or exquisitely spread-out nervous filaments of that other organ, whose builder is the Architect of the universe and the Master of all its harmonies.
Not less an object of wonder is that curious piece of mechanism, the most perfect, within its limited range of powers, of all musical instruments, the organ of the human voice. It is the highest triumph of our artificial contrivances to reach a tone like that of a singer, and among a hundred organ-stops none excites such admiration as the vox humana; a brief account of the vocal organ will not, therefore, be out of place. The principles of the action of the larynx are easily illustrated by reference to the simpler musical instruments. In a flute or flageolet the musical sound is produced by the vibration of a column of air contained in its interior. In a clarionet or a bassoon another source of sound is added in the form of a thin slip of wood contained in the mouth-piece, and called the reed, the vibrations of which give a superadded nasal thrill to the resonance of the column of air.
The human organ of voice is like the clarionet and the bassoon. The windpipe is the tube containing the column of air. The larynx is the mouth-piece containing the reed. But the reed is double, consisting of two very thin membranous edges, which are made tense or relaxed, and have the interval between them through which the air rushes narrowed or widened by the instinctive, automatic action of a set of little muscles. The vibration of these membranous edges (chordæ vocales) produces a musical sound, just as the vibration of the edge of a finger-bowl produces one when a wet finger is passed round it. The cavities of the nostrils, and their side-chambers, with their light, elastic sounding-boards of thin bone, are essential to the richness of the tone, as all singers find out when those passages are obstructed by a cold in the head.
The human voice, perfect as it may be in tone, is yet always very deficient in compass, as is obvious from the fact that the bass voice, the barytone, the contralto, and the soprano have all different registers, and are all required to produce a complete vocal harmony. If we could make organ-pipes with movable, self-regulating lips, with self-shortening and self-lengthening tubes, so that each tube should command the two or three octaves of the human voice, a very limited number of them would be required. But as each tube has but a single note, we understand why we have those immense clusters of hollow columns. As we wish to produce different effects, sometimes using the pure flute-sounds, at other times preferring the nasal thrill of the reed-instruments, we see why some of the tubes have simple mouths and others are furnished with vibratory tongues. And, lastly, we can easily understand that the great interior spaces of the organ must of themselves furnish those resonant surfaces which we saw provided for, on a small scale, in the nasal passages,—the sounding-board of the human larynx.
The great organ of the Music Hall is a choir of nearly six thousand vocal throats. Its largest windpipes are thirty-two feet in length, and a man can crawl through them. Its finest tubes are too small for a baby's whistle. Eighty-nine stops produce the various changes and combinations of which its immense orchestra is capable, from the purest solo of a singing nun to the loudest chorus in which all its groups of voices have their part in the full flow of its harmonies. Like all instruments of its class, it contains several distinct systems of pipes, commonly spoken of as separate organs, and capable of being played alone or in connection with each other. Four manuals, or hand key-boards, and two pedals, or foot key-boards, command these several systems,—the solo organ, the choir organ, the swell organ, and the great organ, and the piano and forte pedal-organ. Twelve pairs of bellows, which it is intended to move by water-power, derived from the Cochituate reservoirs, furnish the breath which pours itself forth in music. Those beautiful effects, for which the organ is incomparable, the crescendo and diminuendo,—the gradual rise of the sound from the lowest murmur to the loudest blast, and the dying fall by which it steals gently back into silence,—the dissolving views, so to speak, of harmony,—are not only provided for in the swell-organ, but may be obtained by special adjustments from the several systems of pipes and from the entire instrument.
It would be anticipating the proper time for judgment, if we should speak of the excellence of the musical qualities of the great organ before having had the opportunity of hearing its full powers displayed. We have enjoyed the privilege, granted to few as yet, of listening to some portions of the partially mounted instrument, from which we can confidently infer that its effect, when all its majestic voices find utterance, must be noble and enchanting beyond all common terms of praise. But even without such imperfect trial, we have a right, merely from a knowledge of its principles of construction, of the preëminent skill of its builder, of the time spent in its construction, of the extraordinary means taken to insure its perfection, and of the liberal scale of expenditure which has rendered all the rest possible, to feel sure that we are to hear the instrument which is and will probably long remain beyond dispute the first of the New World and second to none in the Old in the sum of its excellences and capacities.
The mere comparison of numbers of pipes and of stops, or of external dimensions, though it gives an approximative idea of the scale of an organ, is not so decisive as it might seem as to its real musical effectiveness. In some cases, many of the stops are rather nominal than of any real significance. Even in the Haarlem organ, which has only about two-thirds as many as the Boston one, Dr. Burney says, "The variety they afford is by no means what might be expected." It is obviously easy to multiply the small pipes to almost any extent. The dimensions of an organ, in its external aspect, must depend a good deal on the height of the edifice in which it is contained. Thus, the vaulted roof of the Cathedral of Ulm permitted the builder of our Music-Hall organ to pile the façade of the one he constructed for that edifice up to the giddy elevation of almost a hundred feet, while the famous instrument in the Town Hall of Birmingham has only three-quarters of the height of our own, which is sixty feet. It is obvious also that the effective power of an organ does not depend merely on its size, but that the perfection of all its parts will have quite as much to do with it. In judging a vocalist, we can form but a very poor guess of the compass, force, quality of the voice, from a mere inspection of the throat and chest. In the case of the organ, however, we have the advantage of being able to minutely inspect every throat and larynx, to walk into the interior of the working mechanism, and to see the adaptation of each part to its office. In absolute power and compass the Music-Hall organ ranks among the three or four mightiest instruments ever built. In the perfection of all its parts, and in its whole arrangements, it challenges comparison with, any the world can show.
Such an instrument ought to enshrine itself in an outward frame that should correspond in some measure to the grandeur and loveliness of its own musical character. It has been a dream of metaphysicians, that the soul shaped its own body. If this many-throated singing creature could have sung itself into an external form, it could hardly have moulded one more expressive of its own nature. We must leave to those more skilled in architecture the detailed description of that noble façade which fills the eye with music as the voices from behind it fill the mind through the ear with vague, dreamy pictures. For us it loses all technical character in its relations to the soul of which it is the body. It is as if a glorious anthem had passed into outward solid form in the very ecstasy of its grandest chorus. Milton has told us of such a miracle, wrought by fallen angels, it is true, but in a description rich with all his opulence of caressing and ennobling language:—
"Anon out of the earth a fabric huge
Rose, like an exhalation, with the sound
Of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet,
Built like a temple, where pilasters round
Were set, and Doric pillars overlaid
With golden architrave; nor did there want
Cornice or frieze with bossy sculptures grav'n."
The structure is of black walnut, and is covered with carved statues, busts, masks, and figures in the boldest relief. In the centre a richly ornamented arch contains the niche for the key-boards and stops. A colossal mask of a singing woman looks from over its summit. The pediment above is surmounted by the bust of Johann Sebastian Bach. Behind this rises the lofty central division, containing pipes, and crowning it is a beautiful sitting statue of Saint Cecilia, holding her lyre. On each side of her a griffin sits as guardian. This centre is connected by harp-shaped compartments, filled with pipes, to the two great round towers, one on each side, and each of them containing three colossal pipes. These magnificent towers come boldly forward into the hall, being the most prominent, as they are the highest and stateliest, part of the façade. At the base of each a gigantic half-caryatid, in the style of the ancient hermæ, but finished to the waist, bends beneath the superincumbent weight, like Atlas under the globe. These figures are of wonderful force, the muscular development almost excessive, but in keeping with their superhuman task. At each side of the base two lion-hermæ share in the task of the giant. Over the base rise the round pillars which support the dome and inclose the three great pipes already mentioned. Graceful as these look in their position, half a dozen men might creep into one of them and lie hidden. A man of six feet high went up a ladder, and standing at the base of one of them could just reach to put his hand into the mouth at its lower part, above the conical foot. The three great pipes are crowned by a heavily sculptured, ribbed, rounded dome; and this is surmounted, on each side, by two cherubs, whose heads almost touch the lofty ceiling. This whole portion of the sculpture is of eminent beauty. The two exquisite cherubs of one side are playing on the lyre and the lute; those of the other side on the flute and the horn. All the reliefs that run round the lower portion of the dome are of singular richness. We have had an opportunity of seeing one of the artist's photographs, which showed in detail the full-length figures and the large central mask of this portion of the work, and found them as beautiful on close inspection as the originals at a distance.
Two other lateral compartments, filled with pipes, and still more suggestive of the harp in their form, lead to the square lateral towers. Over these compartments, close to the round tower, sits on each side a harper, a man on the right, a woman on the left, with their harps, all apparently of natural size. The square towers, holding pipes in their open interior, are lower than the round towers, and fall somewhat back from the front. Below, three colossal hermæ of Sibyl-like women perform for them the office which the giants and the lion-shapes perform for the round towers. The four pillars which rise from the base are square, and the dome which surmounts them is square also. Above the dome is a vase-like support, upon which are disposed figures of the lyre and other musical symbols.
The whole base of the instrument, in the intervals of the figures described, is covered with elaborate carvings. Groups of musical instruments, standing out almost detached from the background, occupy the panels. Ancient and modern, clustered with careless grace and quaint variety, from the violin down to a string of sleigh-bells, they call up all the echoes of forgotten music, such as the thousand-tongued organ blends together in one grand harmony.
The instrument is placed upon a low platform, the outlines of which are in accordance with its own. Its whole height is about sixty feet, its breadth forty-eight feet, and its average depth twenty-four feet. Some idea of its magnitude may be got from the fact that the wind-machinery and the swell-organ alone fill up the whole recess occupied by the former organ, which was not a small one. All the other portions of the great instrument come forward into the hall.
In front of its centre stands Crawford's noble bronze statue of Beethoven, the gift of our townsman, Mr. Charles C. Perkins. It might be suggested that so fine a work of Art should have a platform wholly to itself; but the eye soon reconciles itself to the position of the statue, and the tremulous atmosphere which surrounds the vibrating organ is that which the almost breathing figure would seem to delight in, as our imagination invests it with momentary consciousness.
As we return to the impression produced by the grand façade, we are more and more struck with the subtile art displayed in its adaptations and symbolisms. Never did any structure we have looked upon so fully justify Madame de Staël's definition of architecture, as "frozen music." The outermost towers, their pillars and domes, are all square, their outlines thus passing without too sudden transitions from the sharp square angles of the vaulted ceiling and the rectangular lines of the walls of the hall itself into the more central parts of the instrument, where a smoother harmony of outline is predominant. For in the great towers, which step forward, as it were, to represent the meaning of the entire structure, the lines are all curved, as if the slight discords which gave sharpness and variety to its less vital portions were all resolved as we approached its throbbing heart. And again, the half fantastic repetitions of musical forms in the principal outlines—the lyre-like shape of the bases of the great towers, the harp-like figure of the connecting wings, the clustering reeds of the columns—fill the mind with musical suggestions, and dispose the wondering spectator to become the entranced listener.
The great organ would be but half known, if it were not played in a place fitted for it in dimensions. In the open air the sound would be diluted and lost; in an ordinary hall the atmosphere would be churned into a mere tumult by the vibrations. The Boston Music Hall is of ample size to give play to the waves of sound, yet not so large that its space will not be filled and saturated with the overflowing resonance. It is one hundred and thirty feet in length by seventy-eight in breadth and sixty-five in height, being thus of somewhat greater dimensions than the celebrated Town Hall of Birmingham. At the time of building it, (1852,) its great height was ordered partly with reference to the future possibility of its being furnished with a large organ. It will be observed that the three dimensions above given are all multiples of the same number, thirteen, the length being ten times, the breadth six times and the height five times this number. This is in accordance with Mr. Scott Russell's recommendation, and has been explained by the fact that vibrating solids divide into harmonic lengths, separated by nodal points of rest, and that these last are equally distributed at aliquot parts of its whole length. If the whole extent of the walls be in vibration, its angles should come in at the nodal points in order to avoid the confusion arising from different vibrating lengths; and for this reason they are placed at aliquot parts of its entire length. Thus the hall is itself a kind of passive musical instrument, or at least a sounding-board, constructed on theoretical principles. Whatever is thought of the theory, it proves in practice to possess the excellence which is liable to be lost in the construction of the best-designed edifice.
We have thus attempted to give our readers some imperfect idea of the great instrument, illustrating it by the objects of comparison with which we are most familiar, and leaving to others the more elaborate work of subjecting it to a thorough artistic survey, and the rigorous analysis necessary to bring out the various degrees of excellence in its special qualities, which, as in a human character, will be found to mark its individuality. We shall proceed to give some account of the manner in which the plan of obtaining the best instrument the Old World could furnish to the New was formed, matured, and carried into successful execution.
It is mainly to the persistent labors of a single individual that our community is indebted for the privilege it now enjoys in possessing an instrument of the supreme order, such as make cities illustrious by their presence. That which is on the lips of all it can wrong no personal susceptibilities to tell in print; and when we say that Boston owes the Great Organ chiefly to the personal efforts of the present President of the Music-Hall Association, Dr. J. Baxter Upham, the statement is only for the information of distant readers.
Dr. Upham is widely known to the medical profession in connection with important contributions to practical science. His researches on typhus fever, as observed by him at different periods, during and since the years 1847 and 1848, in this country, and as seen at Dublin and in the London Fever Hospital, were recognized as valuable contributions to the art of medicine. More recently, as surgeon in charge of the Stanley General Hospital, Eighteenth Army Corps, he has published an account of the "Congestive Fever" prevailing at Newborn, North Carolina, during the winter and spring of 1862-63. We must add to these practical labors the record of his most ingenious and original investigations of the circulation in the singular case of M. Groux, which had puzzled so many European experts, and to which, with the tact of a musician, he applied the electro-magnetic telegraphic apparatus so as to change the rapid consecutive motions of different parts of the heart, which puzzled the eye, into successive sounds of a character which the ear could recognize in their order. It was during these experiments, many of which we had the pleasure of witnessing, that the "side-show" was exhibited of counting the patient's pulse, through the wires, at the Observatory in Cambridge, while it was beating in Dr. Upham's parlor in Boston. Nor should we forget that other ingenious contrivance of his, the system of sound-signals, devised during his recent term of service as surgeon, and applied with the most promising results, as a means of intercommunication between different portions of the same armament.
In the summer of 1853, less than a year after the Music Hall was opened to the public, Dr. Upham, who had been for some time occupied with the idea of procuring an organ worthy of the edifice, made a tour in Europe with the express object of seeing some of the most famous instruments of the Continent and of Great Britain. He examined many, especially in Germany, and visited some of the great organ-builders, going so far as to obtain specifications from Mr. Walcker of Ludwigsburg, and from Weigl, his pupil at Stuttgart. On returning to this country, he brought the proposition of procuring a great instrument in Europe in various ways before the public, among the rest by his "Reminiscences of a Summer Tour," published in "Dwight's Journal of Music." After this he laid the matter before the members of the Harvard Musical Association, and, having thus gradually prepared the way, presented it for consideration before the Board of Directors of the Music-Hall Association. A committee was appointed "to consider." There was some division of opinion as to the expediency of the more ambitious plan of sending abroad for a colossal instrument. There was a majority report in its favor, and a verbal minority report advocating a more modest instrument of home manufacture. Then followed the anaconda-torpor which marks the process of digestion of a huge and as yet crude project by a multivertebrate corporation.
On the first of March, 1856, the day of the inauguration of Beethoven's statue, a subscription-paper was started, headed by Dr. Upham, for raising the sum of ten thousand dollars. At a meeting in June the plan was brought before the stockholders of the Music Hall, who unanimously voted to appropriate ten thousand dollars and the proceeds of the old organ, on condition that fifteen thousand dollars should be raised by private subscription. In October it was reported to the Directors that ten thousand dollars of this sum were already subscribed, and Dr. Upham, President of the Board, pledged himself to raise the remainder on certain conditions, which were accepted. He was then authorized to go abroad to investigate the whole subject, with full powers to select the builder and to make the necessary contracts.
Dr. Upham had already made an examination of the best organs and organ-factories in New England, New York, and elsewhere in this country, and received several specifications and plans from builders. He proceeded at once, therefore, to Europe, examined the great English instruments, made the acquaintance of Mr. Hopkins, the well-known organist and recognized authority on all matters pertaining to the instrument, and took lessons of him in order to know better the handling of the keys and the resources of the instrument. In his company, Dr. Upham examined some of the best instruments in London. He made many excursions among the old churches of Sir Christopher Wren's building, where are to be found the fine organs of "Father Smith," John Snetzler, and other famous builders of the past. He visited the workshops of Hill, Gray and Davidson, Willis, Robson, and others. He made a visit to Oxford to examine the beautiful organ in Trinity College. He found his way into the organ-lofts of St. Paul's, of Westminster Abbey, and the Temple Church, during the playing at morning and evening service. He inspected Thompson's enharmonic organ, and obtained models of various portions of organ-structure.
