It is curious to note how often art-controversy has become edged with
a bitterness rivalling even the gall and venom of religious dispute.
Scholars have not yet forgotten the fiery war of words which raged
between Richard Bentley and his opponents concerning the authenticity
of the _Epistles of Phalaris_, nor how literary Germany was divided
into two hostile camps by Wolf's attack on the personality of Homer.
It is no less fresh in the minds of critics how that modern Jupiter,
Lessing, waged a long and bitter battle with the Titans of the French
classical drama, and finally crushed them with the thunderbolt of the
_Dramaturgie_; nor what acrimony sharpened the discussion between the
rival theorists in music, Gluck and Piccini, at Paris. All of the
intensity of these art-campaigns, and many of the conditions of the
last, enter into the contest between Richard Wagner and the
_Italianissimi_ of the present day.
The exact points at issue were for a long time so befogged by the
smoke of the battle that many of the large class who are musically
interested, but never had an opportunity to study the question, will
find an advantage in a clear and comprehensive sketch of the facts and
principles involved. Until recently there were still many people who
thought of Wagner as a youthful and eccentric enthusiast, all afire
with misdirected genius, a mere carpet-knight on the sublime
battle-field of art, a beginner just sowing his wild-oats in works
like "Lohengrin," "Tristan and Iseult," or the "Rheingold." It is a
revelation full of suggestive value for these to realise that he is a
musical thinker, ripe with sixty years of labour and experience; that
he represents the rarest and choicest fruits of modern culture, not
only as musician, but as poet and philosopher; that he is one of the
few examples in the history of the art where massive scholarship and
the power of subtile analysis have been united, in a pre-eminent
degree, with great creative genius. Preliminary to a study of what
Wagner and his disciples entitled the "Art-work of the Future," let us
take a swift survey of music as a medium of expression for the
beautiful, and some of the forms which it has assumed.
This Ariel of the fine arts sends its messages to the human soul by
virtue of a fourfold capacity--Firstly, the imitation of the voices of
Nature, such as the winds, the waves, and the cries of animals;
secondly, its potential delight as melody, modulation, rhythm,
harmony--in other words, its simple worth as a "thing of beauty,"
without regard to cause or consequence; thirdly, its force of
boundless suggestion; fourthly, that affinity for union with the more
definite and exact forms of the imagination (poetry), by which the
intellectual context of the latter is raised to a far higher power of
grace, beauty, passion, sweetness, without losing individuality of
outline--like, indeed, the hazy aureole which painters set on the brow
of the man Jesus, to fix the seal of the ultimate Divinity. Though
several or all of these may be united in the same composition, each
musical work may be characterised in the main as descriptive,
sensuous, suggestive, or dramatic, according as either element
contributes most largely to its purpose. Simple melody or harmony
appeals mostly to the sensuous love of sweet sounds. The symphony does
this in an enlarged and complicated sense, but is still more marked by
the marvellous suggestive energy with which it unlocks all the secret
raptures of fancy, floods the border-lands of thought with a glory not
to be found on sea or land, and paints ravishing pictures, that come
and go like dreams, with colours drawn from the "twelve-tinted
tone-spectrum." Shelley describes this peculiar influence of music in
his "Prometheus Unbound," with exquisite beauty and truth--
"My soul is an enchanted boat,
Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float
Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing;
And thine doth like an angel sit
Beside the helm conducting it,
While all the waves with melody are ringing.
It seems to float ever, for ever,
Upon that many-winding river,
Between mountains, woods, abysses,
A paradise of wildernesses."
As the symphony best expresses the suggestive potency in music, the
operatic form incarnates its capacity of definite thought, and the
expression of that thought. The term "lyric," as applied to the
genuine operatic conception, is a misnomer. Under the accepted
operatic form, however, it has relative truth, as the main musical
purpose of opera seems, hitherto, to have been less to furnish
expression for exalted emotions and thoughts, or exquisite sentiments,
than to grant the vocal _virtuoso_ opportunity to display phenomenal
qualities of voice and execution. But all opera, however it may stray
from the fundamental idea, suggests this dramatic element in music,
just as mere lyricism in the poetic art is the blossom from which is
unfolded the full-blown perfection of the word-drama, the highest form
of all poetry.