8. And, finally, the general joy, finding vent in vigorous dancing and
leaping.
It will be seen at once that the programme here is of a different
kind from those of some of Kuhnau's predecessors and contemporaries.
It does indeed aim at representing some external things--such as the
stamping of Goliath, the impact of the stone against his head, and so
on--but they are not inherently absurd or impossible; while he gives a
great deal of his space to the really emotional moments of the story.
Throughout the sonatas, however, it is the poetic purpose that directs
the music, determining both expression, sequence, and form. Every
episode that occurs in the story has to be represented in the music;
and Kuhnau is careful to print, in his score, the verbal indication at
the precise point where the music follows it. He tells us the exact bar
at which the stone is aimed at Goliath, and the bar in which the giant
falls down; where Laban begins to practise his deceit on Jacob, where
Jacob is "amorous and contented," and where "his heart warns him that
something is wrong"; and so on--thereby setting an example to composers
like Strauss, who foolishly give the purchaser of such a score as _Till
Eulenspiegel_ no guide to the various adventures of the hero. Some of
Kuhnau's devices provoke a smile, as in the Fifth Sonata--"Gideon,
the Saviour of the People of Israel." The sign to Gideon was that the
fleece was to be wet with dew, but the ground dry; the next night the
ground was to be wet and the fleece dry. Kuhnau naïvely expresses the
second sign by giving the theme of the first sign in contrary motion.
But all _naïvetés_ apart, a great deal of the music of the Sonatas
is very fine; and it is noteworthy that Kuhnau points out, in his
general preface, that the writer of programme music must be allowed
more liberty than the absolutist to break a traditional "law" when the
expression demands it.[27] Kuhnau, indeed, was on the right path. He
was a man born before his due time; had he lived in our days, and had
at his command all the resources of modern expression and our enormous
orchestras, he might have taken up very much the same position towards
music as the modern programmists.
John Sebastian Bach, who succeeded Kuhnau at the Thomas Church in
Leipzig, made one, and only one, experiment in the same line. This
was the "Capriccio on the departure of my dearly beloved brother."
The first movement, he says, depicts "The cajoleries of friends,
trying to induce him to give up the idea of the journey"; the second
is "a representation of the various things that may happen to him in
foreign lands"; the third gives utterance to a "general lament of his
friends as they say good-bye to him"; and the finale is a fugue on the
postillion's signal.
Bach, however, made no further attempt to develop along these lines.
The work _he_ had been sent into the world to do was of another order.
About the same time Couperin, in France, was cultivating the programme
_genre_ with some success. He not only wrote harmless little things
with titles like "La Galante," but also connected pieces of musical
delineation, such as "The Pilgrims." Like Kuhnau, he justified his
principles in a preface. "In the composition of my pieces," he says,
"I have always a definite object or matter before my eyes. The titles
of my pieces correspond to these occasions. Each piece is a kind of
portrait."
In Rameau again, we get such things as "Sighs," "Tender Plaints,"
"The Joyous Girl," "The Cyclops," etc.; and at a slightly later date
Dittersdorf (1739-1799) wrote twelve programme symphonies, illustrating
Ovid's "Metamorphoses" and "The War of Human Passions."
Mozart's father wrote a musical description of a sledge-journey, in
which the ladies are represented shivering with the cold; but Mozart
himself avoided the programme form as positively as Bach. Haydn,
however, dabbled in it more extensively, as I have already pointed out.
Beethoven's position in the history of programme music is somewhat
peculiar. Just about that time, when the Napoleonic wars had
familiarised every one with the pomp of armies, there was a perfect
deluge of battle pieces. There was probably not a battle of any
importance in those days that had not a fantasia written upon it, each
differing from the others in little else but its title. In a weak
moment Beethoven succumbed to the general temptation and wrote his
"Battle of Vittoria," which is not only one of the least significant
of his works, but one of the least significant works in the history
of programme music. Beethoven's real contributions to this form of
art were indirect rather than direct. He told one of his friends that
he had always a picture in his mind when composing; and if this could
be taken quite literally, it would seem as if we were on the trail of
programme music pure and simple. But we shall probably never know the
extent to which Beethoven relied on poetic suggestions for his musical
inspiration; and if we look at the internal evidence of his music, we
shall see that although it often deals with poetic subjects, it treats
them from the standpoint of the old forms rather than from that of
the new. So far as their intellectual origin is concerned, the superb
_Leonora_, _Egmont_, and _Coriolan_ overtures are poetic music; that
is, they aim, in a musical texture, at sketching a character or telling
a story. But so far as the form is concerned in which the composer
has chosen to work, the procedure is determined almost entirely by
the laws of absolute music. Wagner has drawn attention to this in
a well-known passage in his essay on "Liszt's Symphonic Poems." He
shows what the formal laws of the old symphony were, and how necessary
they were to give logical coherence to abstract music. But, he says,
when these laws were applied uncompromisingly to a different kind of
art-work--the overture--a disturbance occurred at once between the aims
of the overture and the demands of the symphonic form. All that the
latter was concerned with was _change_--the constant representation
of themes in new lights. The overture had, in addition to this, to
concern itself with dramatic development. "Now it will be obvious," he
says, "that, in the conflict of a dramatic idea with this form, the
necessity must at once arise either to sacrifice the development (the
idea) to the alternation (the form), or the latter to the former."
He goes on to praise Gluck's _Iphigenia in Aulis_ overture for the
skilful way it keeps the dramatic development from being spoiled by
compliance with extraneous laws of form. Then, he says, Beethoven,
working on a bigger scale and with a more stupendous imagination than
Gluck, nevertheless came to grief on the rock Gluck managed to escape.
"He who has eyes," says Wagner, "may see precisely by this overture
(_i.e._ the great _Leonora No. 3_), how detrimental to the master the
maintenance of the traditional form was bound to be. For who, at all
capable of understanding such a work, will not agree with me when I
assert that the repetition of the first part, after the middle section,
is a weakness which distorts the idea of the work almost past all
understanding; and that the more, as everywhere else, and particularly
in the coda, the master is obviously governed by nothing but the
dramatic development. But whoso has brains and lack of prejudice enough
to see this, will have to admit that the evil could only have been
avoided by entirely giving up that repetition; an abandonment, however,
which would have done away with the overture-form--_i.e._ the original,
merely suggestive, symphonic dance-form--and have constituted the
departure-point for creating a new form."
Wagner is undoubtedly right. Beethoven hovered uncertainly at times
between the demands of poetic expression and the demands of absolute
form. To write poetic music pure and simple, of course, was not his
mission in the world. That was reserved for other men. One side of his
powerful genius was to be taken up by Wagner and pushed to its logical
conclusion in the music-drama. Another side, cultivated by Berlioz,
Liszt, and Richard Strauss, comes to its logical end in the symphonic
poem; and just as Wagner criticised the Beethoven overture from the
standpoint of music-drama, I propose, shortly, to criticise Wagner
from the standpoint of the symphonic poem. I shall try to show that
so far from the Wagnerian opera representing, as Wagner thought, the
ideal after which the music of Beethoven was striving, it is really
only a transitional form; and that the symphonic poem is the completely
satisfactory, completely logical form, to which the Wagnerian opera
stands in the same relation as the _Leonora_ overture does to _Tristan
and Isolde_.