PROGRAMME MUSIC (continued 2)

What now is the great advantage, according to Wagner's theory, that the musical dramatist has over the poet or the novelist? Simply this, that he can discard all the more or less uninspired matter that they require in order to make their purpose clear, and plunge at once into the heart of his subject. Take, as an example, this very poem of Tristan and Isolde. The poet or the novelist, before he can begin to move you, must descend to a relatively unemotional plane in order to acquaint your understanding with certain positive facts it is essential it should know. He must tell you who Tristan and Isolde were, when and where they lived, what was their relation to the other people of the drama, and a score of other things that can hardly be made emotional in themselves. A long poem or drama is bound, by the nature of the case, to have a certain amount of dross scattered about among its gold; the beautiful appeals to Feeling are only made into a coherent story or picture by the use of this less emotional tissue. From this difficulty the musical dramatist escapes; in music he has a powerful engine that enables him to dispense with all these mere wrappings of his Feeling, and reach directly and immediately to the Feeling itself. He avoids the arbitrary, and takes up his stand at once in the centre of the "purely human." Thus Wagner needs no preliminary fumbling about for his tragedy; the first bar of the overture transports you at once into the world and the mood to which the poet must drag you through twenty explanatory pages. "All that detailed description and exhibition of the historico-conventional which is requisite for making us clearly understand the events of a given, remote historical epoch, and which the historical novelist or dramatist of our times has therefore to set forth at such exhaustive length—all this I could pass over." He concerns himself not with historical subjects but with the simple myth or legend, for "the legend, in whatever age or nation it occurs, has the merit of seeing nothing but the purely human content of that age and nation, and of giving forth that Content in a form peculiar to itself, of sharpest outline, and therefore swiftly understandable." The musician, in fact, must discard everything but the purely human; he must take a poetical subject of which this is the core, and then kindle it into incandescence by means of music. In Tristan, says Wagner, "I plunged into the inner depth of soul-events, and from out this inmost centre of the world I fearlessly built up its outward form. A glance at the volume of this poem will show you at once that the exhaustive detail-work which an historical poet is obliged to devote to clearing up the outward bearings of his plot, to the detriment of a lucid exposition of its inner motives, I now trusted myself to apply to these latter alone. Life and death, the whole import and existence of the outer world, here hang on nothing but the inner movements of the soul." The object, of course, was—to recur to a previous order of imagery—to reduce the amount of dross in the work and to increase the amount of pure gold; all the available space ought to be devoted not to demonstrations or recitals of fact but to the evocation of feelings, to "exhibiting the inner springs of action, those inner soul-motives which are finally and alone to stamp the Action as a necessary one."

So much, then, is clear. Without questioning one of Wagner's contentions—accepting his theory as true, without disagreeing with his data or his reasoning—we come to these positions:—

Poetry without music is lacking in expression, in appeal to Feeling: music without poetry is lacking in the power to give a definite direction to Feeling.

An art-form therefore must be sought that will be an amalgam of the two, with the advantages of each and the defects of neither.

In proportion as the advantages are retained and the defects eliminated will the new art-form approach ideal perfection.

The musical defect to be guarded against is the attempt to subject dramatic music to the laws of symphonic music: this is easily overcome, and there only remains the poetic defect to be avoided, i.e.

All poetic or verbal material that cannot be "musicalised," or caught up into the spirit of music, is superfluous and harmful; therefore in proportion as the music-drama is perfected will this kind of material tend to disappear.

So far, so good. The point remaining to be considered is this: can we ever totally eliminate this non-musical material from opera? Let us say, for example, in terms of the Wagnerian æsthetic, that a good opera on the subject of Romeo and Juliet will be nearer artistic perfection than Shakespeare's play, because it will dispense with all the poet's clumsy methods of reaching the Feeling through the viscous waters of the Understanding—that it will concern itself only with the "purely human," with the "inner springs of action" of the souls of the characters, and that it will raise these—to use a term borrowed from electrical science—to the highest potential, the highest incandescence. Granting all this, let us then press our question a point further still. There will, let us admit, be less non-emotional matter in the opera than in the drama, less hard, incalcitrant material that cannot be emotionalised, but that has to be there because without it the structure cannot hang together. Admitting that there will be less of it, will any one venture to say that there will be none of it in the opera? I think not. Â priori considerations apart, an appeal to practical experience will soon disillusionise us. Of all the thousands of operas that have been written since opera began, not one, outside the works of Wagner, will pass successfully through the ordeal. Of Wagner's operas, Rienzi, The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin are, by his own admission, as I have already shown, put out of court. The Ring will certainly not stand the test; Parsifal certainly will not; The Mastersingers certainly will not. There only remains Tristan, of the form and substance of which he himself was justly proud. It will pass the judges with a lighter sentence than any of the others; but will it be dismissed without a stain on its character? By no means. Even in the pure, dazzling, magnificent metal of Tristan itself we find embedded, here and there, a refractory piece of alien ore, of raw material not yet put through the subtle alchemy that must divinise it. If then this last straw fails us, where shall we look for salvation? The only answer can be that salvation on these lines is impossible. Reduce the coarser, explanatory, unemotional matter of opera—the merely utilitarian stuff, the paste that binds the more precious things together—reduce this as you will, some of it you are still bound to retain in opera, for without it opera cannot have enough intellectual, dramatic consistency to ensure our getting hold of it. And if (1) granting the premisses, the reasoning by which the Wagnerian theorem is supported has been flawless, and (2) the brain that strove to embody that theorem in practical art was an organ mightier than anything the sons of men are likely to see for a very long time to come—then, I take it, there is only one conclusion possible, that the failure occurs through attempting to realise the theory in the wrong medium. To phrase it differently, the logic of the case is not rigorously enough applied at the last stage, when it comes to be pushed to its ultimate conclusion. Always bearing in mind that, according to Wagner, the strong point of the musical drama, as compared with any other poetic art-form, is that the non-emotional matter in it can be reduced to a minimum, let us ask ourselves whether a form cannot be found in which even this minimum can be dispensed with. The answer will be that the necessary conditions are united in the symphonic poem, which is therefore the true heir of Wagner's theory, and has been too long kept out of its lawful inheritance.

Two points now fall to be considered: (1) Can the affiliation of the symphonic poem to the Wagnerian theory be properly established, and the superiority of its rights of succession over those of its half-brother opera be fully demonstrated; and (2) are there no defects, suggested by Wagner himself, that unfit the symphonic poem to hold sway over opera?

The first point need not detain us long; least of all can the thorough-going Wagnerian here have much right to protest. If Wagner's reasoning is right his conclusion must be accepted—namely, that the less waste matter you have in your poetic music the better. Now he himself attributed the failure to "musicalise" the poetic subject completely to this cause, that instead of addressing the Feeling we were too prone to address the Understanding. He tells us, too, that words are the channel through which the Understanding operates. In all cases, then, where words are employed, there is a strong probability of their carrying us with them further along the path of mere Understanding than the ideal art requires; and diminish this feature as much as you can, some of it is still bound to persist. So that your only resort is to find a form that shall make use of all the advantages of poetic music and keep clear of this one defect. This form is unquestionably the symphonic poem. It does eliminate the defects that attend the use of words, for it dispenses with words; it meets Wagner's demand that music shall not sing merely for its own sake, but for a poetic purpose; it can order its structure upon the same lines as opera, i.e. the themes are conceived at once in terms of musical beauty and in terms of poetic appropriateness, and they suggest, by the modifications they undergo, the changing aspect of the personages and scenes of the drama. A symphonic poem is the concentrated essence of opera; it is to the opera as Bovril is to the ox.

But Wagner himself, it may be said, expressly warned us against programme music as being an artistic error. That is quite true. Wagner's argumentation here, however, is exceptionally weak. It is clear that he had no properly thought-out principles to guide him at this point. To begin with, his differentiation of programme music from the symphonic poem is thoroughly fallacious. If programme music is music based upon a programme—i.e. upon a literary subject—then every symphonic poem, nay, every opera, necessarily belongs to that category. The truth probably is that Wagner clung to this false distinction because he thought it would help him out of an embarrassing situation. He found himself compelled to say something publicly upon Liszt's symphonic poems; and I am afraid his essay on that subject is hardly a model of the ingenuous. To condemn Liszt was, of course, impossible for many reasons. At all costs he had to be commended; but if we critically examine the essay of eighteen pages, we shall find that surprisingly little of it really deals with Liszt's work. There is much declamation, and much æsthetic theorizing—most of it very good; but surprisingly little rational criticism of Liszt's symphonic poems. Practically all that Wagner does is (1) to admit the â priori proposition that it is just as sensible to write a symphonic poem as a symphony—he asks "whether March or Dance ... can supply a worthier motive of form than, for instance, a mental picture of the ... characteristic features in the deeds and sufferings of an Orpheus, a Prometheus, and so forth," and whether it is not nobler for music to take its Form "from an imagined Orpheus or Prometheus motive, than from an imagined march or dance motive"; and (2) to contrast disparagingly the procedure of Berlioz with that of Liszt. But the final impression the essay leaves on me is that it was a duty which Wagner performed rather unwillingly. He did not want to say too much for Liszt's music; so on the one hand he argued that at any rate the symphonic poem was permissible, and on the other hand that it was preferable to the programme music of Berlioz.

Here his distinctions and his reasoning will not hold. He objected in Berlioz, as we have seen, to the way in which the musician followed the literary clues of his subject, without recasting these so as to fit them in with a scheme that was musically logical. Now it is absurd to condemn programme music en masse because a particular man blunders in it; Berlioz may quite well be wrong [34] and programme music still be right. But take Wagner's criticism as it stands, and correlate it with the previous arguments of this paper, and what is the conclusion to be drawn? Just this, that if Wagner could not, as he says, "hold on to scenic motives not present" before his eye, he was not listening to the music in the proper way. It is not necessary, for most of us, to have a poetic scene put visibly before us; we can easily reconstruct it in imagination; and what the symphonic poem does is to give us the musical feeling the opera aims at giving us, and to tell us to imagine the occasion of it all, instead of putting this occasion on a stage before us. The prelude and finale of Tristan constitute a rudimentary symphonic poem, in the hearing of which we never ask to hear a word or see an actor. A more explicit symphonic poem does the same thing on a larger scale. We can, if we like, make a three-act opera out of Romeo and Juliet, but on Wagner's own principles the essence of the thing is contained in Tchaikovski's concert overture. And if I am told that this theme is to be associated with the lovers, this with Friar Lawrence, and so on, then during the playing of the overture the whole drama is acted in my brain, and is quite as real for me as if I beheld artificial men and women acting artificially in an artificial stage-setting. So with Ein Heldenleben. Nothing would be easier than to make an opera out of this subject; but who wants the opera, with its eking out of the parts that really do matter with a number of parts that really do not matter, with all its stage absurdities, its posturing actors? We have the diffuse emotions of three or four hours concentrated into the rich emotions of forty minutes. We have the whole life of the hero just as we would get it in the opera; but the small basket of strawberries has fewer pieces of grit in it than the bigger basket. [35]

I hope I shall not be taken to mean that the opera is a false and useless form, and that composers should henceforth all work frenziedly at the manufacture of symphonic poems. My position is that for certain purposes we must have opera; by it alone can certain needs of our soul be satisfied, just as—though Wagner did not know it—for the satisfaction of other needs we must resort to pure poetry and pure music. But for certain other satisfactions we must have recourse to the symphonic poem; and this form, I contend, is the only form that can be deduced logically from Wagner's own æsthetic theory. As I have tried to show, in the symphonic poem alone can you get music fertilised by a poetic purpose, and yet, by eliminating the actual words, avoid the intrusion even of the minimum of non-emotional substance. In The Ring and the Book, Browning describes how the artificer has to fashion a gold ring. In order to make his material workable, he has to blend an alloy with the gold; but when the circle is complete he drives out the alloy with a spirt of acid, leaving the pure metal only. That is the symphonic poem; the opera is the ring with the alloy left in it. If perfection of form is what we want—the consummate, intimate transfusion of matter and form, the "truly unitarian" form to which Wagner aspired—then it is in the symphonic poem that we must look for it, not in the opera.

Only one objection that Wagner might urge against this has, I believe, not yet been considered. He expressly laid it down, it may be pointed out, that it is not sufficient for us to carry the external, moving, concrete features of the drama in our heads; they must be set before us, in the fulness of real life, on the stage. "Not a Programme," he says in Zukunftsmusik, "which rather prompts the troublous question 'Why'? [36] than stills it—not a Programme, then, can speak the meaning of the symphony; no, nothing but a stage performance of the Dramatic Action itself." This was an opinion he always maintained; but after all is it anything more than a mere obiter dictum? Wagner had a passion for seeing anything and everything upon the stage—a passion that at times becomes rather childish, for he was quite unconscious of a number of the absurdities of his characters and his situations that are painfully evident to the audience. Truth to tell, his notions of the stage were just a little crude at times; in any case he did not see that even the best acting in opera is per se bound to be inferior to the best acting in drama—people cannot sing and at the same time be wholly natural in demeanour. I take it, then, that his predilection for stage-settings was a purely personal one; it has no logical relation to his general æsthetic theory; and we can refuse to be bound by it. We all like opera, and we tolerate its absurdities and its intellectual deficiencies because we know these are inseparable from it; but once more it has to be said that from these stage absurdities the symphonic poem is free. Mr. Arthur Symons has recently pointed out the strain that is put on our sense of the ridiculous when what should be merely a symbol is thrust visibly before our eyes. The Stranger in Ibsen's Lady from the Sea is very impressive as a symbol of the call of the sea to the blood of Ellida Wangel; but when an ordinary human being in a tourist suit comes on the stage and purports to be the symbol incarnate, our sense of the poetry of the thing is severely tried. So with the scene where Wotan attempts to bar Siegfried's progress with his spear, and Siegfried shatters it with his sword. This is all very fine as a symbol of "the last ineffectual stand of constituted authority against the young, untrammelled individuality of the future"; but what the candid eye sees on the stage is a young man chopping in two a piece of stick held by an old man, who picks up the pieces, walks off with them, and says, "Advance! I cannot stop thee!" What is very impressive, merely conceived imaginatively as a symbol, becomes unimpressive when narrowed down to ordinary men with legs and arms, holding "property" swords and spears.

Opera, indeed, has no lack of absurdities, and this will always prevent it taking rank as the highest form of dramatic art; and Wagner, as I have said, must be held to have taken some of his own stage absurdities and puerilities with quite abnormal seriousness. It stands to reason, too, that the symphonic poem suffers from no such disabilities. If Wagner's theory be correct, then a symphonic poem on a given subject can follow, as regards its musical form, the lines laid down for it by the poetic impulse, just as efficiently as an opera on the subject could do; while it avoids the "padding" that is inseparable from opera by simply giving us, in our programme, an outline of the poetic subject, instead of daubing the subject over, from head to foot, with pseudo-poetry that rarely rises above the level of rhymed or rhythmic prose. As for the inability to follow the poetic motives of the subject from the programme—well, I fancy we are not all so imperfectly endowed with imagination as Wagner seems to have been here. I quite admit that there are minds like his in this respect, to which poetic music conveys little or nothing without speech and action—that are unable, while they listen, say to Ein Heldenleben, to keep all the details of the story moving at equal pace with the music; but the sufficient answer to such people is that other people can do this. To sum it all up, the symphonic poem is theoretically deducible from Wagner's own æsthetic; while in practice, if we miss in it some of the elements that make opera interesting, we are compensated by the absence of other elements that make opera tedious and absurd.

XI

One point still remains to be discussed, though we need only touch on it very briefly. How far can music represent external things—ought it, indeed, to try to represent external things at all? It was Schopenhauer, I think, who said that music was not a representative but a presentative art. But that was very superficial psychologising even in his day, and it is still more superficial in ours. The whole problem is exceedingly simple if people, in their anxiety to prove that music cannot "imitate," would not confuse it unnecessarily. Heaven only knows how much bastard æsthetic has been born of that unfortunate remark of Beethoven's about the Pastoral Symphony, which we have already had occasion to examine. As a specimen, look at this quotation from Victor Cousin, intended to demonstrate, in its own way, that music must not be "painting," but only an "expression of emotion." "Give the wisest symphonist a tempest to render. Nothing is easier than to imitate the whistling of the winds and the noise of the thunder. But by what combination of ordered sounds could he present to our sight the lightning flashes which suddenly rend the veil of night, and that which is the most terrific aspect of the tempest, the alternate movement of the waves, now rising mountain high, now sinking and seeming to fall headlong into bottomless abysses? If the hearer has not been told beforehand what the subject is, he will never divine it, and I defy him to distinguish a tempest from a battle. In spite of scientific skill and genius, sounds cannot represent forms. Music, rightly advised, will refuse to enter upon a hopeless contest; it will not undertake to express the rise and fall of the waves and other like phenomena; it will do better; with sounds it will produce in our soul the feelings which successively arise in us during the various scenes of the tempest. It is thus that Haydn will become the rival, even the conqueror of the painter, because it has been given to music to move and sway the soul even more profoundly than painting." [37]

The point is, be it observed, that unless you were told beforehand, you could not say whether a given orchestral piece was meant to represent a tempest or a battle; the composer is therefore advised not to try to paint a tempest, but to "produce in our soul the feelings which successively arise in us during the various scenes of the tempest." Why, how in the name of all æsthetic innocence does this help us? How are we, in the absence of a verbal indication, to distinguish "the feelings which successively arise in us during the various scenes of the tempest" from the feelings which would arise in us during the various scenes of a battle? We only hear, that is, a certain mass of sound; how are we to know, from the mere "feeling" this arouses in us, that it refers to a battle or a tempest or anything else? What man, for example, listening to solemn music, can possibly know whether it is meant to describe the death of Napoleon, the funeral of Mr. Gladstone, the poetic contemplation of nature, the opening of the St. Louis Exhibition, the life-work of John Stuart Mill, or anything else under the sun? The "feelings" are perfectly incompetent to pierce through the indefinite tone to the definite scene that inspired it. What the composer has to do is to tell us what this definite scene is; nobody, for example, would have guessed that the fourth movement of Schumann's Rhenish symphony had its origin in the installation of the Archbishop of Geissel as Archbishop of Cologne, if the composer himself had not told us so. Nobody would have known that a certain part of the Pastoral Symphony represents a peasant's gratitude after a storm, if Beethoven had not said so himself. The "feelings" are no more reliable guides in cases of this kind than the "painting" is. And if the composer has to give us a verbal clue in order to let us know definitely what feelings he is representing, he has only to give us a verbal clue to make it quite clear to us what his painting is intended to represent; and there is no more odium in needing the verbal clue in the latter case than there is in the former.

No one in his senses has ever pretended that music alone could depict external things so accurately that we could recognise them infallibly at once, without any assistance from the sight, as in opera, or from a verbal accompaniment. As M. Alfred Ernst has put it: "It is not a question of painting an object—music could not succeed in doing that; nor is it a question of reproducing exactly the sounds of nature, such as the murmur of flowing water, the rumbling of thunder, the song of birds; but, when these phenomena are in the subject that is being treated, of recalling them to the mind by means of tone.... Thus conceived, music does not materialise itself in becoming descriptive; it would be more accurate to say that it spiritualises the phenomena of nature...." And he shows how Mozart, for example, employs description. "In his Don Juan he has more than once translated the gesture, the mimic, of his personages. We may cite, for instance, the ascending scales in the orchestra in the duel between the Commandant and Don Juan. The figures in the bass refer to the old man, those above to Juan; each time that one of the two adversaries steps towards the other and attacks, this figure comes out, strident, quick as the thrust of a sword, and at the moment when Don Juan presses the Commandant, lunges at him time after time, strikes him and kills him, the violin scales succeed each other without giving the auditor time to breathe.... At the beginning of the sextet, when Leporello tries to slip away, fearing to be taken for Don Juan, the orchestra reproduces his stealthy movements; we see the unhappy wretch creeping along cautiously, his back bent, feeling round for a way out." [38] Nor does one need to be reminded of the numerous pieces of "description," of "imitation," in Wagner—of the water-music, the fire-music, the swish of Klingsor's spear, the voices of the forest, and so on. Every dramatic, or, indeed, vocal writer is full of passages of this kind; it simply cannot be avoided in music that aims at something beyond abstract note-spinning.

But in every case, as we can see, the music is not left to tell its story alone; we are not compelled to guess the subject represented merely from the tones themselves. The subject is told us in some way or other—we see Don Juan thrusting at the Commandant, or the spear flying at Parsifal's head, or the fire licking the couch of Brynhilde; or else there is, in the words of the song or opera, some suggestion of the external thing that is being illustrated in the music. And in the symphonic poem, all that we require in order that everything may be perfectly clear is a statement, in the programme, of the picture upon which the music is based. I am not expected to know, merely from the tones alone, what the "giant" motive in the Rheingold is meant to represent; but when I am told that it relates to the giants, I can take delight in the expressiveness of its lumbering, unwieldy movements. Similarly I must be told that the opening pages of Also sprach Zarathustra are meant as a representation of the majesty and spaciousness of Nature. And—again to draw upon the argument of the foregoing pages—there is nothing that can be done in this line in the song or the opera that cannot be done quite as effectually in the symphonic poem, if composers would only give their hearers the same full insight into their literary intentions as the song or opera writer does, and if hearers would only take the trouble to master these intentions before they listen to the music that is based upon them. If they would do this, their pleasure in the symphonic poem would be enormously increased; everything in it would be alive to them. For myself, at any rate, to listen to Till Eulenspiegel or Ein Heldenleben or Don Quixote is not only to enjoy the music but to see the whole action as clearly as if I were reading it in a book or watching it on the stage. I get none of the boredom, none of the unfortunate provocations to laughter, that are inseparable from that artificial, stagey form of art, the opera. I miss, of course, some of the factors that make opera so glorious—the inexpressible thrill communicated by the human voice, the quickening of the pulse that is given by the movements of the actors and the catastrophes of the stage; but on the other hand I am spared a great many things, and I have the satisfaction of knowing that my sense of form is receiving the purest, most undiluted pleasure it is possible for it to receive in poetic music. The case for programme music is quite as strong as the case for opera or for the symphony. That many stupid things have been done in its name, that many fools and weaklings have fought under its banner, counts for nothing; how many symphonies, how many operas, are there that the world would willingly let die! The rightness of the form is not affected by the wrongness of the people who choose to work in it; and that the form itself is essentially right, I have, I hope, given adequate proof. Finally, to the question of how far music is justified in trying to suggest external things, we can only say that it is better not to be too dogmatic. Things that would have seemed impossible a hundred years ago are done with ease to-day. Who would believe that a windmill could be represented in music? Yet Strauss's windmill in Don Quixote is really extraordinarily clever and satisfying; he suggests wonderfully, too, the caracoling of the horse as the knight puts him through his paces. His pictorial faculty, indeed, is something unique in the history of music; Wagner's is only an imperfect instrument by the side of it. The representative power of music is growing day by day. The only æsthetic fact we can be sure of is this, that no piece of representation will be tolerated unless it is at the same time music. That is the ultimate test; the imitative passages that make us smile are the passages that are merely imitative, without sufficient musical charm to keep them alive for us. But here, of course, we simply get back to the position already advanced in this article—that in all poetic music there must be as thorough a satisfaction as possible not only of the literary or the pictorial but of the musical sense.

FOOTNOTES:

To ALFRED WILLIAMS