On two lines of inquiry, then, we have found the case for programme
music somewhat stronger than its hasty opponents have imagined. On the
one hand, we have seen that when the nature and origin of music are
psychologically analysed, there are two mental attitudes, two orders
of expression, and two types of phrase, from one of which has arisen
absolute, from the other, programme music. On the other hand, we have
seen that, from a variety of reasons, programme music could not have
been cultivated by the great masters of the eighteenth century who
beat out the form of the classical symphony; while its fascination for
the modern men is due to its being the only medium of expression for a
certain order of modern ideas. It is quite time, then, that not only
critics but composers realised that when the brains are out the form
will die; that you cannot write a symphony in the form of Mozart or
Beethoven unless your mental world is something like theirs, and that
if the literary, or pictorial, or dramatic suggestion is all-potent
with a composer, it is folly for him to throw it aside, and try, by
using a form that is uncongenial to him, to get back into an emotional
atmosphere it would be impossible for him to breathe.
The change that came over music about the beginning of the nineteenth
century, and that first came to full fruition in Wagner's operas, is
best described in the oft-quoted words of Wagner himself, as "the
fertilisation of music by poetry." He felt that there was considerable
evidence of the action of poetry upon music in Beethoven, though, as
can be seen from the passages on the _Leonora_ overture already quoted,
in Beethoven the reins are still too tightly clutched by absolute
music. He always, no matter what the origin of his conceptions may
have been, worked them out within the limits of symphonic form.
Berlioz, roughly speaking, went the other way, always keeping his eye
fixed intently on the lines of his poetic scheme. Wagner's criticism
upon this practice of Berlioz is interesting, even if not final. In
listening to music of this kind, he says, "it always happened that I
so completely lost the musical thread that by no manner of exertion
could I re-find and knit it up again." His point was this, to put it
in words of our own: if he was listening to a Berlioz work, he could
not get complete pleasure out of the music, _as_ mere music, because
it was not developed along purely musical lines; the chief theme, let
us say, gave him pleasure on its first announcement, but he could not
see the _rationale_ of its future treatment, as one can always see
the _rationale_ of the return of the themes in a symphony. This was
because the course of the music was determined not by abstract musical
intentions, but by poetic intentions which were not made clear to
him; and the result was, as it were, that he fell between two stools.
"I discovered," he says, "that while I had lost the musical thread
(_i.e._ the logical and lucid play of definite motives), I now had to
hold on to scenic motives not present before my eye, nor even so much
as indicated in the programme. Indisputably these motives existed in
Shakespeare's famous balcony scene" (Wagner is speaking of Berlioz's
_Romeo and Juliet_); "but in that they had all been faithfully
retained, and in the exact order given them by the dramatist, lay
the great mistake of the composer." And Wagner's contention was this,
that when a composer wants to reproduce in music a certain scene from
a drama, he must not take the thing as it stands and move on from
point to point in exactly the same way as the poet did. What was
right for the poet would be wrong for the musician. _He_ must tell
his story or paint his scene according to the laws and capacities of
music, not those of poetry; and Wagner goes on to praise Liszt for
having, by superior artistic instinct, avoided the pitfall that nearly
proved fatal to Berlioz. Liszt, instead of trying to tell us in music
precisely what the poet had already told us in verse, rethinks in music
what the poet has said, and gives it out to us as something born of
musical feeling itself.
Now we need not go into the question of how far Wagner is right in
what he says of Berlioz. This, at all events, is certain, from his
own words in praise of Liszt, that Wagner had no _à priori_ objection
to the symphonic poem, but only to the symphonic poem when it went
on what he took to be the wrong lines. All that is needed is for the
proper compromise to be agreed upon between the poetic purpose and the
musical form. This, I think, Richard Strauss has effected, and it would
be interesting to have had Wagner's criticism of Strauss. But since we
cannot get that, _we_ may criticise Wagner from the standpoint of the
symphonic poem.