Before embarking on this æsthetic argument, however, let us briefly
conclude our historical view of the development of programme music.
It was with the Romantic movement that the infusion of poetry into
music became complete, and at the same time the vocabulary and the
colour-range of music became adequate to express all kinds of literary
and pictorial ideas. The older musicians could not, if they had tried,
have written the modern symphonic poem or the modern song. And this for
several reasons. In the first place, they were pretty fully occupied
with making music the language it now is; they had to form a vocabulary
and think out principles of architecture; and the last thing they
could have done was to leave the safe and formal lines of their own
art--safe because they were precise and formal--and plunge into a mode
of expression that would have seemed to them to offer no coherence, no
guiding principle. In the second place, they lacked one of the main
stimuli to the development of modern programme music, the suggestion
of a vivid, living, modern, highly emotional and picturesque poetry. A
Schumann, a Brahms, a Franz could not have written such songs as they
have done in any century but this; for the mainspring of their songs
has been the emotional possibilities contained in the words. It was
only when composers really felt the deepest artistic interest in the
words they were setting, instead of regarding them as merely a frame
for musical embroidery, that they attained the modern veracity and
directness of phrase. You cannot do much more with words like those
of the older song or opera than set them with a view to their purely
musical rather than their musico-poetical possibilities; and if you
persist, out of deference to a foolish tradition, in setting to music
the words of a foreign and relatively unfamiliar language, you will
perforce become more and more conventional in your phrases and in your
general structure. It was the peculiar advantage of the modern German
song-writers that they could set lyrics of their own language, alive
with every suggestion that could lend itself to musical treatment.
The emotion was intense, the form concentrated and direct, the idea
definite and concise; and the musicians, having by this time a fully
developed language for their use, set themselves to reproduce these
qualities of the poem in their music. Hence the new spirit that came
into music with the Romantic movement, and that reacted on opera, on
piano music, and on the symphonic poem.
Another great difference between the pre-Romantic and the post-Romantic
composers was that the latter were, on the whole, much more cultured
men than the former. This was due, of course, not to any particular
merit of their own, but to the changed social circumstances of the
musician. The system of patronage in the eighteenth century, while it
undoubtedly helped the musician to develop _as_ a musician, must have
retarded his development in other ways. Under that system, where he was
often little better than the servant of some aristocrat, he must often
have been debarred from studying the world at first-hand, meeting it
face to face, looking at it through his own eyes. Neither Haydn[28]
nor Mozart, for example, stood on the level of the best culture of
the time. The great German historian of music, Ambros, has pointed out
how, in Mozart's letters from Italy, the talk is all of the singers
and dancers; "he scarcely seems to have noticed the Coliseum and the
Vatican, with all that these contain." And Ambros goes on to say that
the modern musician reads his Shakespeare and his Sophocles in the
original, and knows them almost by heart. He reads Humboldt's Cosmos
and the histories of Niebuhr and Ranke; he studies the dialectic of
Hegel as well as, or perhaps more than, the art of fugue; and if he
goes to Italy he does not trouble himself about the opera, but occupies
himself with nature and the remains of classic art. He is, in fact,
says Ambros, "Herr Microcosmos."[29]
For a fair picture of the ordinary life of a musician in the house
of his patron in the eighteenth century we have only to turn to the
Autobiography of Dittersdorf. Among them all, indeed, Gluck and Handel
seem to be the only musicians who possessed much culture,[30] and who
strike us as being, apart from music, the intellectual equal of the
great men of the time--of Voltaire, Rousseau, Condorcet, Diderot,
Lessing, and the rest. There is no evidence that Beethoven was either
a man of wide culture, or a respectable thinker outside his own art.
It is, indeed, probable that the enormous musical power of many of
these men, and the centuries of progress through which they rushed
music in comparatively a few years, was due to their being nothing
else but musicians, to the concentration of all their faculties, all
their experiences, upon the problem of making sound a complete, living,
flexible medium of expression. But the later musicians were of another
order. The Romantic movement bred a new type of musician. He no longer
sat in the music-room of an aristocrat, clothed in the aristocrat's
livery, and spun music out of his own inner consciousness. He moved
about in the world and saw and learned a good deal. He associated
with poets; he frequented the studios of painters. We get men like
Hoffmann, at once novelist, painter, musician, and critic; like Liszt,
pianist, composer, author; like Schumann, musician and musical critic;
like Wagner, ranging greedily over the whole field of human knowledge,
and mixing himself up--in more senses than one--with every possible
and impossible subject under the sun. I am not using the term in any
offensive or disparaging sense when I say that the average modern
musician, in matters outside music, is a much better educated and more
all-round man than his predecessor; he knows more, sees more, reads
more, thinks more. Men like Wagner, Brahms, Richard Strauss, Hugo
Wolf, and Bruneau, stand much closer to the general intellectual life
of their day than any of the older musicians did to the intellectual
life of _his_ day. I am not for a moment contending that they are any
greater _musicians_ merely on this account; I simply state it as a
psychological factor in their work, as something that determines, to a
great extent, the quality of that work, and certainly determines their
choice of subjects.
The way it does this is by making them anxious to express in their
music all the impressions they have gathered from the world and from
their culture. But in order that they might do this, two things were
necessary, as we have already seen. The vocabulary of music--its range
of melody and harmony--had to be increased, and the capacity of the
orchestra had to be enormously developed. It is folly to laugh at the
men of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for not getting on
further with poetical music. They had not the means at their disposal
to do so. Sonata-form grew up to a great extent on the piano and the
violin; and the nature of these instruments largely determined what
could and should be uttered upon them. It was not till harmony got
richer and deeper and fuller, and men had learned to extract all kinds
of expression from the orchestra, that programme music in the true
sense of the word became possible.
The broad historical facts, then, are that the stimulus to poetic
music in the nineteenth century came from the wider education of the
musician, the great development of the means of musical expression, and
the incessant stimulation of the musician by poetry and literature in
general.[31] As we know, the new spirit broke out in three forms--in
the highly emotional song of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Franz, and the
others; in the poetical music-drama of Wagner; and in the symphonic
poems or programme symphonies of Berlioz, Liszt, Tchaikovski, Raff, and
a dozen others, leading up to Richard Strauss. Even the men who did
not actually dabble much in the last-named form helped the cause of
instrumental poetic music in other ways. Schumann, for example, with
his poetic little piano pieces, his delicate sketches of character in
the _Carneval_ and _Papillons_ and elsewhere, was really following
up the same trail as led to Liszt's _Mazeppa_, Berlioz's _Harold en
Italie_, and Strauss's _Till Eulenspiegel_.