The late Sidney Lanier, a critic of unusual sanity and freshness
of vision, contended that so far from being a late and excrescent
growth, programme music is "the very earliest, most familiar, and most
spontaneous form of musical composition." We need not go quite so far
as this, for it seems to me that it is impossible to date either
kind of music first in order of time. Just as one early man placed
straight and curved lines in such relations that they pleased the
eye by their mere formal harmony, while another placed them in such
relations that they pleased by suggesting some aspect of man or nature,
so did early music spring with one musician from the mere pleasure
in the successions and combinations of tones, with another from the
desire to convey in sound a suggestion of the thoughts aroused in him
by his intercourse and his struggles with his fellow-men and with the
world. Lanier's statement is evidently a slight exaggeration; but I
think he has invincible reason with him when he goes on to ask, "What
is any song but programme music developed to its furthest extent? A
song is ... a double performance; a certain instrument--the human
voice--produces a number of tones, none of which have any intellectual
value in themselves; but, simultaneously with the production of the
tones, words are uttered, each in a physical association with a tone,
so as to produce upon the hearer at once the effect of conventional
and of unconventional sounds.[22] ... Certainly, if programme music
is absurd, all songs are nonsense." This, I think, is the key to the
problem. Let us look at it a little more closely.
Let us imagine two primitive men, each with the capacity for expressing
feeling in musical sound. One of them manages to find a phrase of a
few notes that gives him pleasure. Because it gives him pleasure he
repeats it. Having repeated it a number of times he finds the mere
repetition of it becoming monotonous; so next time he repeats it in
a slightly different way. He now experiences, without understanding
why, a subtler form of pleasure. If you told him he was making a very
practical demonstration of the law that a great deal of æsthetic
delight consists in realising unity in variety, he would not grasp
your meaning; but all the same that is what he is doing. He still
has his old pleasure in the agreeable succession of tones; but this
pleasure is intensified, subtilised, by another--the pleasure of
detecting the theme in the disguises it assumes. This primitive man
has made the first step towards sonata form; he is assisting at the
birth of absolute music. From this root there grows up all our pure
delight in agreeable tunes for their own sake, in the embroidery of
them, in the juggling with them; in a word, all our delight in absolute
music.[23] Now take the other man. He starts along another line. When
he begins to trace his rude melodic curve, it is not primarily because
he finds an all-absorbing delight in the curve itself. He begins
because some definite experience has moved him emotionally, and the
emotional disturbance must find an outlet in tone; his melodic curve
must suggest the experience. Let us say it is the death of a friend.
Here is a much more definite impulse than was acting upon the other
man; and it accordingly leads to a more definite expression. The curve
the melody takes is now determined not merely by the musical pleasure
it gives by going this way or that, but primarily by the need to make
the melody representative of a definite feeling, or suggestive of the
being or the event that aroused the feeling. _This_ man is at the turn
of the road that leads to poetical music--to the song, the opera, and
the symphonic poem. (I do not allege, let me say again, that there
is an absolute line of demarcation between absolute music and poetic
music, or between the states of mind from which they flow; the two
are always crossing and re-crossing into each other's territory. I am
simply throwing into high relief the element in each that gives it its
peculiar significance.) In absolute music, as Wagner pointed out, the
essential thing is "the arousing of pleasure in beautiful forms." In
poetic music the essential thing is the veracious rendering in tone
of an emotion that is as definite as the other is indefinite. Take
two concrete examples. The opening phrase of Beethoven's 8th Symphony
refers to nothing at all external to itself; it is what Herbert Spencer
has called the music of pure exhilaration; to appreciate it you have to
think of nothing but itself; the pleasure lies primarily in the way
the notes are put together.[24] But the sinister motive that announces
the coming of Hunding, in the first act of the _Valkyrie_, appeals to
you in a different way. Here your pleasure is only partially due to
the particular way the notes go; the other part of it is due to the
_veracity_ of the theme, its congruence with the character it is meant
to represent. And, to go back to our two primitive men, the first of
them was in the mood that would ultimately give birth to the opening of
the 8th Symphony, while the second of them was in the mood that would
ultimately give birth to the Hunding motive.
Any one who takes the trouble to analyse the phrases of an ordinary
symphony and those of a modern song will perceive a broad difference
between the kinds of ideas evoked by them. In the old symphony or
sonata a succession of notes, pleasing in itself but not having
specific reference to actual life--not attempting, that is, to get
at very close quarters with strong emotional or dramatic expression,
but influencing and affecting us mainly by reason of its purely
formal relations and by the purely physical pleasure inherent in it
as sound--was stated, varied, worked out and combined with other
themes of the same order. Take a thousand of these themes--from Haydn,
Mozart, and the early Beethoven, for example--and while they affect
you musically you will yet be unable to say that they have taken their
rise from any _particular_ emotion, or that they embody any special
reflection upon life. It is the peculiarity of music that while on the
one hand it may speak almost as definitely as poetry, and refer to
things that are cognised intellectually, as in poetry, on the other
hand it may make an impression on us, purely as sound, to which the
words of poetry, purely as words, can offer no parallel effect. A verse
of Tennyson with the words so transposed as to have no intellectual
meaning would make no impression when read aloud; no pleasure, that
is, would be obtainable merely from the sound of the words themselves.
But play the diatonic scale on the piano, or strike a random chord
here and there, and though the thing means nothing, the ear is bound
to take some pleasure in it. Musical sound gives us pleasure in and by
and for itself, independently of our finding even the remotest mental
connection between its parts. This connection may be great, or small,
or practically non-existent; and the greater it is, of course, the
more complicated becomes our pleasure; but it is not essential to our
taking physiological delight in music considered purely as sound. Now
it is quite possible to construct a lengthy piece of music that shall
have absolutely no emotional expression, in the sense of suggesting
a reference to human experience--that shall be purely and simply a
succession and combination of pleasurable sounds. In the nature of
the case, it is clear that not much of the actual music that is
written could be of this order throughout. Emotion of some quality and
degree is sure to intrude itself here and there into even the most
"mathematical" music; but it is quite unquestionable that while some
music is alive with suggestions of human interest, of actual man and
life, there is an enormous quantity of very pleasant music from which
the interest of actuality is wholly absent, that reaches us through
physiological rather than through psychological channels, or at any
rate, if this is putting it unscientifically, through quite other
psychological channels.
Compare with music of this kind the phrases of a highly expressive
modern song, or of such a piece as Wagner's _Faust Overture_, or of
one of Liszt's or César Franck's symphonic poems. Here the inspiration
comes direct from some aspect of external nature or from some actual
human experience; and the musical phrase becomes correspondingly
modified. While there still remain (1) the physiological pleasure in
the theme as sound, and (2) the formal pleasure in the structure,
balance, and development of the theme, there is now superadded a third
element of interest--the recognition of the veracity of the theme, its
appropriateness as an expression of some positive, definite emotion,
something seen, some actual experience of men. And music with a
content of this kind, it is important to note, can depart widely from
the manner of expression and of development of absolute music, and
still be interesting. The proof of this is to be had in recitative.
Here there is a very wide departure from the more formal music in
every quality--melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic. Attempt to play an
ordinary piece of recitative as pure music, without the voice and
without a knowledge of the words, and its divergence from music of the
self-sufficing order generally becomes obvious. The justification of
recitative is to be sought not in its compliance with the laws that
govern pure non-dramatic instrumental music, but in its congruence
with a definite literary idea that is seeking expression through the
medium of tone; and our tolerance of it and appreciation of it are
due to this supplementing of the somewhat inferior physical pleasure
by the superior mental pleasure given by the sense of dramatic truth
and fitness. So again in the song. Let any one try to imagine how
little the ending of Schubert's _Erl-King_ would suggest to him if he
were totally ignorant of the words or the subject of the song, and he
will realise how the literary element at once modifies and supports
music of this kind. As a piece of absolute music, the final phrase of
the _Erl-King_ means nothing at all; it only acquires significance
when taken in conjunction with the words; and the justification of
its relinquishment of the mode of expression of pure self-sufficing
music is precisely its congruence with the literary idea. To go a step
further, the phrases typical of Mazeppa in Liszt's symphonic poem,
both in themselves and in their development, would probably puzzle us
if we met with them in a symphony pure and simple; they only become
such marvels of poignant and veracious expression when associated
in the mind with Mazeppa. And, to go still further, and to show not
from the structure of a theme but from the treatment of it the change
that may be induced by a "programme," I may instance the repetitions
in the last movement of Tchaikovski's "Pathetic" Symphony, which,
though unwarrantable in a symphony of the older pattern, seem to many
of us surcharged with the most direct psychological significance.
Right through, from recitative to the symphonic poem or the programme
symphony, we see that the fusion of the literary or pictorial with the
musical interest necessarily leads to a modification of the tissue of
the musical theme and of the musical development. You could not, if
you would, express the story of Mazeppa in such phrases as those of
the "Jupiter." So that, while we thus have an _a priori_ justification
of the programme phrase, we begin to understand the difficulties that
attend programme development, and some reasons for its many failures
in the past. Much of the work that had been done by the older men in
consolidating and elaborating the form of the symphony was found to
be of little help to the new school. A new type of phrase had to be
evolved, and with it a new method of development.
No one, I think, will dispute the broad truth of the principles here
laid down. That absolute music _per se_ and vocal or programme music
_per se_ have marked psychological differences between them, and that,
while the older bent was towards the one, the modern men show a marked
preference for the other--these are fairly obvious facts. Hence the
necessity of urging it upon the classicists that it will not do to
apply the formal rules of the old music to the new _en bloc_, as if
they were equally valid in both _genres_. If the modern men reject
the classical forms, and try to produce new ones of their own, it can
only be because their ideas are not the classical ideas, and must find
the investiture most natural and most propitious to them. When Wagner
rejected the current opera-form, and strove to attain congruence of the
poetical and the musical schemes at all points of his work, the pedants
told him that he avoided the long-sanctioned forms because he could
not write in them. They did not see that it would have been much less
trouble for him, as a mere musician, to shelter himself behind the old
forms than to evolve a consistent new one, and that he aimed at a new
structure simply because he had something quite new to say. Similarly,
when the pedants lay it down that the programmists choose the programme
form because it is an easier one to work in than the absolute form,
they fail to see how much originality of mind is needed to get veracity
of expression in the song or the symphonic poem, where the work,
besides having to satisfy our musical sense, will be tested by the
standard of the literary utterance or the literary idea with which it
deals.
V
Without making too wide a digression into the æsthetics of music, we
can see that the tendency to write the one kind of music is as deeply
rooted in us as the tendency to write the other kind. Some musicians,
by constitutional bias, take the one route, some the other; but neither
party has the right to assume that the kind of music it prefers is the
only kind. Hence it is an error to say that music is stepping out of
her own province when she becomes programme music. Her real province
includes both absolute and programme music; the one is as inherent in
us as the other.
But for reasons that will become apparent later, the absolute branch of
the art developed more rapidly than the poetical branch. Even by the
time absolute music had come to its magnificent climax in Beethoven,
programme music had really done nothing at all of any permanent value.
Many composers seemed to have a vague idea that purely instrumental
music _could_ be made to convey suggestions of real life just as poetry
does, and just as the song does; but they had not yet learned where to
begin and where to end, what was worth doing in this line and what was
not worth doing. Their attempts at programme music were mostly crude
imitations of external things, in a language not yet rich enough to
express what they wanted to say; they contain, for our ears, rather
too much programme and rather too little music. In the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries the minds of the men who tried to write
poetic music for instruments alone, ran in two main directions. They
either wrote pieces musically interesting in themselves, and gave them
fanciful titles, such as "Diana in the wood," "The virtuous coquette,"
"Juno, or the jealous woman," and so on, or they frankly began with
the intention of representing appearances and events in music. Thus in
the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book we have pieces with the titles, "Faire
wether," "Calm wether," "Lightening," "Thunder," and "A clear day."
These things were not confined to one country; they are met with all
over Europe. Occasionally the programme writers worked through vocal
as well as instrumental forms. Muffat wrote pieces of the "Diana in
the wood" order. Jannequin described the battle of Malegnano in music,
Hermann the battle of Pavia. In the seventeenth century Carlo Farina
wrote orchestral pieces in which the voices of animals were imitated.
Buxtehude wrote seven klavier-suites, describing in music the nature
and quality of the seven planets. Frescobaldi did a battle capriccio.
Frohberger wrote a suite showing the Emperor Ferdinand IV. making
his way up into heaven along Jacob's ladder. Frohberger, indeed, was
realistic beyond the average. He not only painted nature, for example,
but indicated the locality as accurately as a geography or a guide-book
could do; and it was not merely humanity in general that moved about
among his scenes, but the Count this or the Prince that. In some
suites, that are unfortunately lost to an admiring world, he painted a
storm on the Dover-Calais route, and gave a series of pictures of what
befell the Count von Thurn in a perilous journey down the Rhine.[25]
All this seems very crude now, but the very prevalence of the practice
points to a widespread feeling in those times that music _could_ be
made to serve as an art of representation. Indeed, a much earlier
example of this tendency can be quoted, showing that even the ancient
Greeks had their programme-music writers. There is a passage in the
Geography of Strabo, in which he describes what he heard at Delphi.
Here, he says, they had a musical contest "of players on the cithara,
who executed a pæan in honour of Apollo. The players on the cithara
were accompanied by players on the flute, and by citharists, who
performed without singing. They performed a melos (strain) called
the Pythian mood. It consisted of five parts--the anacrusis, the
ampeira, cataceleusmus, iambics and dactyls, and pipes. Timosthenes,
the commander of the fleet of the second Ptolemy, and who was the
author of a work in ten books on Harbours, composed a melos. His
object was to celebrate in this melos the contest of Apollo with the
serpent Python. The anacrusis was intended to express the prelude;
the ampeira, the first onset of the contest; the cataceleusmus, the
contest itself; the iambics and dactyls denoted the triumphal strain
on obtaining the victory, together with musical measures of which the
dactyl is peculiarly appropriated to praise and the iambics to insult
and reproach; the syrinxes and pipes described the death, the players
imitating the hissings of the expiring monster."[26] The unsympathetic
may say it is to be hoped that the gentleman was a better admiral than
he seems to have been a musician.
But to get back to modern Europe again. These crude imitations of
birds and beasts and the rolling of the waves are not programme music;
they are the rawest part of the raw material out of which programme
music is made. The difficulty is to make the piece interesting both
as music, and as a representation of what it purports to describe.
A composer may fling a phrase before us and tell us this represents
Hamlet, or Othello, or a death-rattle, or the Israelites crossing
the Red Sea, or anything else he likes; but unless the phrase has an
interest of its own, and unless he can satisfy our musical as well as
our literary sense by the way he handles and combines and transforms
it in the sequel, he will not arrest our attention. The great problem,
indeed, of both the modern symphonic poem and the modern opera is to
tell a story adequately and at the same time to satisfy our desire for
interesting musical development. If the composer fixes his attention
too exclusively on the literary part of his subject, his work will
lack organic _musical_ unity; if he is too intent on achieving this,
he will probably fail in dramatic definiteness. This, I shall soon try
to show, is really the crux both of opera and of programme music; and
if _we_ rarely succeed in solving so knotty a problem, it is not to be
wondered at that the solution did not come to the men of the sixteenth
or seventeenth or eighteenth century.
As a matter of fact, however, one old composer _did_ try to effect a
union of the programme purpose with some real sense of musical form.
This was Johann Kuhnau (1660?-1722), who, in his six Bible Sonatas,
describes "the fight between David and Goliath," "the melancholy of
Saul being dissipated by music," "the marriage of Jacob," and so on.
Kuhnau was a really remarkable man. He was a good musician who could
write interesting clavier-pieces apart from any programme scheme. He
was moreover a keen-witted man who tried to think out seriously the
problem of the union of musical expression and poetical purpose, so
far as any man in those days could do so. In the preface to the Bible
Sonatas he points out that the musician, like the poet, prose-writer,
and painter, often wants to turn his hearers thoughts in a particular
direction. If he wants to express in his music not merely sadness
but the sadness of this or that individual--to distinguish, as he
says, a sad Hezekiah from a weeping Peter or a lamenting Jeremiah--he
must employ words in order to make the emotion definite. But not
necessarily, be it observed, by writing the music _to_ the words, as
in a song. His own plan is to illustrate his subject in music, and make
his poetic purpose clear to us by giving a detailed verbal account
of it. Thus he prefaces each of his Bible Sonatas with an elaborate
account of the event it deals with, and then summarises the main
motives. This, for example, is the summary of the first Sonata, after a
long general introduction. The Sonata expresses, he says--