This brings us to a second point. We are often told that programme
music is all right if it is so conceived and so handled that it
suffices _as pure music_, whether we know the programme or not.
And as this seems to many people like a fair compromise, and as
programme-musicians have been ill-treated so long that some of them are
positively thrilled with gratitude now for _not_ being kicked, there is
a tendency to accept this quasi-solution of the problem as something
like the final one. The programmist is willing to admit that a number
of themes, no matter how agreeable, do not constitute symphonic music
unless they have some emotional connection and some logical musical
development; while the absolutist graciously allows that a concrete
subject may be the basis of a symphony, if only the music is of such a
kind that it will appeal to the hearer just as much, although he may
not know what the subject is.
It is precisely against this compromise that I think we ought to
protest, for it seems to me to be based on a complete misunderstanding
of the natures of absolute and of programme music. Not only does it
ignore the difference in intellectual origin between a phrase such
as that which opens the finale of the _Jupiter_ symphony, and such a
one as that which symbolises _Till Eulenspiegel_, but it overlooks
the fact that along with this difference in the thing expressed there
must necessarily go a difference in the manner of expressing it. It
is impossible to subscribe to the insidious compromise that programme
music ought to "speak for itself," without a knowledge of the programme
being necessary.[32] We not only need the programme--the statement of
the literary or pictorial subject of the composition--but this is at
once answerable for half our pleasure and a justification of certain
peculiarities of form which the music may now safely assume. If the
shape and colour of the themes of a piece of music, the order of
their occurrence, and the variations they undergo, are all determined
by the composer having a certain picture in his mind, it is surely
necessary for us to be told what that picture is. If it was necessary
for him when he was composing, it is necessary for us if we are to
listen to the music as he meant us to listen to it. To put a symphonic
poem before us without telling us all the composer's intentions in
it, is as foolish as to make us listen to the music of a song or an
opera without hearing the words. In the opera and the song, things
go this way or that because the poetic purpose requires it, and the
justification of them is precisely their appropriateness to the poetic
purpose. Similarly, things go this way or that in the symphonic poem
because the poetic purpose requires it; and here also we require to
know what that poetic purpose was before we can justify or condemn what
the musician has done. Let us examine a simple case, say the _Romeo and
Juliet_ overture of Tchaikovski, and see whether this particular work
could be equally understood and appreciated, as pure music, by the man
who knows and the man who does not know the programme.
There is not the slightest doubt that the _Romeo and Juliet_ would
give intense pleasure to any one who simply walked unpremeditatedly
into a concert room and heard the overture without knowing that it
had a poetical basis--who listened to it, that is, as a piece of
music pure and simple in sonata form. But I emphatically deny that
this hearer would receive as much pleasure from the work as I do, for
example, knowing the poetic story to which it is written. He might
think the passage for muted strings, for example, extremely beautiful,
but he would not get from it such delight as I, who not only feel
all the _musical_ loveliness of the melody and the harmonies and the
tone colour, but see the lovers on the balcony and breathe the very
atmosphere of Shakespeare's scene. I am richer than my fellow by two
or three emotions in a case of this kind. My nature is stirred on two
or three sides instead of only one. I would go further, and say that
not only does the auditor I have supposed get less pleasure from the
work than I, but he really does not hear Tchaikovski's work at all. If
the musician writes music to a play and invents phrases to symbolise
the characters and to picture the events of the play, we are simply
not listening to _his_ work at all if we listen to it in ignorance of
his poetical scheme. We may hear the music, but it is not the music
he meant us to hear, or at all events not heard as he intended us to
hear it. If melody, harmony, colour and development are all shaped and
directed by certain pictures in the musician's mind, we get no further
than the mere outside of the music, unless we also are familiar with
those pictures. Let us take another example. The reader will remember
that the overture opens with a _religioso_ theme, in the clarinets and
bassoons, that is intended to suggest Friar Lawrence. In the ensuing
scenes of conflict between the two opposing factions, this theme
appears every now and then in the brass, sometimes in a particularly
forceful and assertive manner. The casual hearer whom I have supposed
would probably look upon this simply as a matter of counterpoint;
Tchaikovski has invented two themes, he would say, and is now simply
combining them. But here again he would be wrong. These passages
certainly give us musical pleasure, and are as certainly meant to do
so, but they are intended also to do something more. The reappearance
of the "Friar Lawrence" theme has a dramatic as well as a musical
significance. Taken as it is from the placid wood-wind and given to the
commanding brass, and made to stand out like a warning voice through
the mad riot that is going on all round it, it tells its own tale at
once to any one with a knowledge of the subject of the overture. So
again with the mournful transformation of the love motive at the end
of the overture. Tchaikovski does not alter the melody and the harmony
in this way for merely musical reasons. He has something more in his
mind than an appeal to the abstract musical faculty; and I repeat that
the hearer who is ignorant of this something more not only gets less
than the full amount of pleasure from the work, but really does not
hear the work as Tchaikovski conceived and wrote it, and intended it
to be heard. The same argument holds good of the song. Imagine one
of the most highly and subtly expressive of modern songs--say the "O
wüsst' ich doch" or the _Feldeinsamkeit_ of Brahms--sung to you at a
concert without your having the slightest knowledge of the words. Some
pleasure, of course, you could not help feeling in the music; but it
would be nothing compared with the sensations you would have if you
knew the words or could follow them in a programme. Then you would find
not only that certain passages that seemed to you the least interesting
before, as mere music, are poignantly expressive, but these apparent
peculiarities are justified, and indeed necessitated, by the poetry.
Now imagine that you hear the same song three months later. You have
forgotten the actual words point by point; but you still retain the
recollection of the emotional moods they suggested; and so you are
still responsive to each _nuance_ of expression in the music. Listening
to a song under these conditions is precisely the same as listening
to a symphonic poem. In _Die Ideale_, for example, Liszt divides
Schiller's poem into sections of different intensity or different
_timbre_ of feeling, and places each of these in the score before the
section of the music that illustrates it. _Die Ideale_ is, in fact, an
extension of the song-form, in which the words are not sung but are
either suggested to us or supposed to be known to us. But it is folly
to suppose that either in the Brahms song or _Die Ideale_ the man who
does not know the literary basis can get the same pleasure as the man
who does.
We have only to treat all other symphonic poems in the same way as we
have just treated Tchaikovski's _Romeo and Juliet_--to ask ourselves
what the composer meant us to hear, and how much of it we really _do_
hear if we do not know his poetical scheme--to see the folly of holding
up absolute music as the standard to which programme music ought to
conform. Occasionally, however, the objection is put in the inverse
way, and we are told that programme music is absurd because it does
not speak intelligibly to us, does not carry its story written upon it
so plainly that no one can mistake it. The charge of absurdity must be
really laid at the door of the composer. The plain truth is that a
composer has no right to put before us a symphonic poem without giving
us the fullest guide to his literary plans. It would be ridiculous of
Wagner or Schubert to think their business was ended when they had
simply given their music the title of, say, _The Ring of the Nibelung_
or _The Erl-king_; it is equally ridiculous of Strauss to call a work
_Till Eulenspiegel_ or _Don Juan_, and leave us to discover the rest
for ourselves. If Strauss, for example, put together the Don Juan theme
(the one on the four horns) in that particular order not merely because
he liked the sequence of sounds, but because they accurately limned
the picture of Don Juan which he had in his eye at that moment, it is
folly of him to throw it before _us_ as a mere self-existent sequence
of sounds, and not to tell us what aspect of Don Juan it is meant to
represent.
As for "the inherent stupidity of programme music"--to which opinion
one critic was led by having, in the innocence of his heart, thought
the motive just mentioned signified one thing, while, he afterwards
discovered, it signified quite another--I would put it to him that he
is never likely to go wrong again over this phrase, and that each time
he hears _Don Juan_ he will, to this extent, be nearer seeing what the
composer meant him to see than he ever was before. And if he had an
equal certainty of the meaning of all the other subjects in _Don Juan_,
would he not then be able to recreate the whole thing in accordance
with Strauss' own ideas? And would not all difficulty then vanish,
and the "inherent stupidity" seem to be in those who cursed the form
because they had not the key to the idea? Let any one listen to _Till
Eulenspiegel_ with no more knowledge of the composer's intentions than
is given in the title, and I can understand him failing to make head or
tail of it. But let him learn by heart the admirable German or English
analyses that can now be had in almost any programme-book, and if all
does not then become as clear to him as crystal, if then he cannot
follow all the gradations of that magical piece of story-telling--well,
one can only say that nature has deprived him of the symphonic-poem
faculty, just as she makes some people insensitive to Botticelli
or Maeterlinck. He does but throw an interesting light on his own
psychology; the value of the musical form remains unassailed.
Now why does not Strauss, or any other composer of programme music,
spare himself and us all this trouble by showing us, once for all, the
main psychological lines upon which he has built his work? The composer
himself, in fact, is the cause of all the misunderstanding and all the
æsthetic confusion. Nothing could be clearer than the symbolism of the
music in Strauss' _Don Quixote_, when you know the precise intention
of each variation; but the fact that Strauss should give the clue to
these in the piano duet and omit it all from the full score shows how
absurdly lax and inconsistent the practice of these gentlemen is.
_Also sprach Zarathustra_, again, is quite clear, because indications
are given here and there of the precise part of Nietzsche's book
with which the musician is dealing; while _Ein Heldenleben_, in the
absence of an official "Guide," simply worries us by prompting futile
conjectures as to the meaning of this or that phrase. Wagner would not
have dreamt of throwing a long work before us, and simply telling us
that the subject of it was _Parsifal_. Why, then, should the writer
of symphonic poems expect us to fathom all his intentions when he has
merely printed the title of his work? If the words of the opera are
necessary for me to understand what was in Wagner's mind when he wrote
this or that motive, surely words--not accompanying the music, but
prefixed to it--are needful to tell me what was in Strauss' mind when
he shaped the violin solo in _Ein Heldenleben_. If it is absurd to
play to me a song without giving me a copy of the words, expecting me
to understand the music that has been born of a poetical idea as if it
had been written independently of any verbal suggestion, it is equally
absurd to put before me, as pure music, an orchestral piece that was
never conceived as pure music. If the poem or the picture was necessary
to the composer's imagination, it is necessary to mine; if it is not
necessary to either of us, he has no right to affix the title of it to
his work.
It is curious, again, that people who can defend Wagner as against the
absolutists cannot also see that they are implicitly justifying Strauss
and his fellows. Thus another critic writes that "Wagner saw that the
intellectual idea could not be conveyed by music alone; that together
with the colour--the music--must go the spoken word to make clear
what was meant." So far, good. But then he quarrels with Strauss for
trying to make _his_ themes expressive of something more than music
pure and simple, and giving us a programme to help us. Why, where in
the name of lucidity is the difference between singing to a phrase of
music the words that prompted it, and printing these words alongside
the phrase or at the beginning of the score? Does it matter whether
the composer writes a love-scene and has the actual words _sung_ by a
tenor and a soprano, or merely puts the whole thing on an orchestra,
and _tells_ us that this is a scene between two lovers, and that their
love is of such and such a quality? For the life of me I cannot see
why the one proceeding is right and the other wrong. And once more, if
it is essential that we should not be left in the slightest doubt in
the case of the opera as to who the protagonists are and what is the
nature of their sentiments, it is equally essential, in the case of the
symphonic poem, that we should not be left in ignorance of any of the
points that have gone to make the structure of the music what it is. No
symphonic poem ought to be published or performed without the fullest
analysis of it by the composer himself, just as he would never think of
publishing the music of his song or his opera without the words. There
is no compromise possible. If the song and the opera are legitimate
blends of literary ideas and musical expression, so is the symphonic
poem, and if the literary basis has to be given us in full in the case
of the opera, we equally need it in the other case as completely as it
can be set before us. The great trouble is that composers like Strauss
so often do neither the one thing nor the other; they neither put their
work before us as music pure and simple, nor give us sufficient clue to
what the representative music is intended to represent.
And now let me try to show briefly that Wagner misunderstood the
meaning of his own reforms, and that the ideal poetic art-form after
which he was striving was not the opera but the symphonic poem.
X
To make the following argument clearer I will state its conclusion
at once; I am going to try to show that Wagner's own analysis of the
natures of poetry, music and drama conclusively proves that if there
can be said to be such a thing as the ideal form of art, it is not the
opera but the symphonic poem. I am not going to criticise Wagner's
theory, except for a moment here and there. I am going to accept it
broadly just as it stands, assume it to be perfectly founded on facts
and perfectly logical in the bulk of its exposition, and prove from it
that he stopped short at the final conclusion--that had he been quite
consistent to the end he would have seen, all through his own argument,
the finger of demonstration beckoning him on to a point further
than that of opera, to a point still higher up the road, where the
symphonic poem was awaiting him. And to draw this conclusion I think we
do not need to call in the aid of anything but his own words.
In _A Study of Wagner_ (1899) I contended that, owing to the structure
of his mind, Wagner was to a large degree insensitive to the charms
of poetry purely as poetry and of music purely as music. He did not,
that is, and could not, get from poetry or from abstract music the
precise sensations, completely satisfactory in themselves, that a
lover of poetry or a lover of abstract music would get. Poetry to him
had something unsatisfactory, imperfect, incomplete in it, unless it
reached out a hand to music; music was similarly defective unless it
was born of a poetic stimulus. To dispute this is to be blind to the
plain evidence of Wagner's prose works; the mere assertion to the
contrary of his more uncritical admirers counts for simply nothing
against the numerous passages that can be brought up in proof. Remarks
such as this, "What is not worth the being sung, neither is it worth
the poet's pain of telling," or this, "that work of the poet's must
rank as the most excellent, which in its final consummation should
become entirely music," or this, "A need in music which poetry alone
can still," or this, "If the work of the sheer word-poet appears as a
non-realised poetic aim, on the other hand, the work of the absolute
musician is only to be described as altogether bare of such an aim; for
the Feeling may well have been entirely aroused by the purely-musical
expression, but it could not be _directed_,"[33]--remarks such as
these are not to be explained away. Nay, Wagner's very notion of an
art-work that should embrace all the arts was a sure proof of there
being a specific something in each art to which he was impervious.
This, then, is the prime fact in Wagner's artistic psychology. When
a poetical idea occurred to him, it was one that cried out for the
emotional colour of music to complete it; when a musical idea occurred
to him, it was one controlled and directed from the start by a poetic
concept. Hence not only his dramatic work but his theoretical work is
simply the expression of this psychological bias. His opponents did him
an injustice when they said he worked out certain theories and then
wrote operas to illustrate and justify them. The fact was that the
theories and the operas were only two branches from the same trunk--not
cause and effect, but two effects of the same cause. In the operas
and the prose works alike he was simply seeking self-expression. But
muddled thinker as I hold Wagner to have been upon most of the subjects
his busy brain took up, he was perfectly clear as to what he wanted
to do in opera, and what he wanted to say in explanation of it. Even
the distressing opacity of his style, that makes the reading of him so
severe a trial to one's literary sense, cannot prevent the big outlines
of his system standing out in perfect clearness. In that system he
thought he had demonstrated three things--(1) that at a certain stage
of its evolution poetry has to call in the aid of music in order
fully to realise its desires, (2) that music for the same reason has
at a certain stage to call in the aid of poetry, and (3) that in the
musical drama we get the best powers of music and of poetry exerted to
the fullest, and combined in a harmonious whole. (He also held that
the scene-painting, the stage-setting, and the gestures of the actors
gratified adequately our other æsthetic senses; but we need not concern
ourselves with this aspect of his theory here.)
Let me first make it quite clear that Wagner wished to get an ideal
musical-poetic art-form by shearing off from music all that did not
tend towards poetry, and from poetry all that did not tend towards
music. "Unity of artistic Form," he says in _Opera and Drama_, "is
only thinkable as the emanation of a united Content: a united Content,
however, we can only recognise by its being couched in an artistic
expression through which it can announce itself _entirely_ to the
Feeling. A Content which should prescribe a twofold expression,
_i.e._ an expression which obliged the messenger to address himself
alternately to the Understanding and the Feeling--such a Content
could only be itself a dual, a discordant one. Every artistic aim
makes primarily for a united Shape.... Since it is the instinctive
Will of every artistic Aim to impart itself to the Feeling, it
follows that the cloven Expression is incompetent to entirely arouse
the Feeling...." "This," he goes on to say, "This entire arousing
of the Feeling was impossible to the sheer Word-poet, through _his_
expressional organ; therefore what he could not impart through that
to Feeling, he was obliged to announce to Understanding, so as to
compass the full utterance of the content of his Aim: he must hand
over to Understanding, to be thought out, what he could not give to be
perceived by Feeling." Thus poetry falls to the ground, as it were,
between two stools; the poet wants to make a direct appeal to Feeling,
but he is partly defeated by having to make this appeal through the
medium of words, which are more the organ of Understanding than of
Feeling. The one thing to be done, then, is to supply this deficiency
of Feeling by a resort to music, whose appeal _par excellence_ is to
the Feeling.
But _per contra_, music itself, as abstract music, is incomplete;
because, although it does indeed move us, it leaves us in doubt as
to the cause and purpose of the emotion. "If the work of the sheer
Word-poet," says Wagner, "appears as a non-realised poetic Aim, on the
other hand the work of the absolute Musician is only to be described
as altogether bare of such an Aim; for the Feeling may well have been
entirely aroused by the purely-musical expression, but it could not be
_directed_." Or, as he phrases it in another place, instrumental music
had worked away at its regular sound-patterns until it "had won itself
an idiomatic speech--a speech which in any higher artistic sense,
however, was arbitrary and incapable of expressing the purely-human,
so long as the longing for a clear and intelligible portrayal of
definite, individual human feelings did not become its only necessary
measure for the shaping of those melodic particles."
So much, then, is clear; according to the Wagnerian theory, mere
poetry needs music to help it to make its direct appeal to Feeling;
mere music needs the concrete suggestions of poetry to give it order
and direction. Even in the later works of Beethoven the pendulum
shifts from absolute, abstract musical tone-weaving to the effort to
say more definite things; there awoke in him, says Wagner, "a longing
for distinct expression of specific, characteristically individual
emotions," and he "began to care less and less about merely making
music." The climax of this impulse to blend musical feeling and poetic
purpose in the one art-work was, of course, to be the Wagnerian opera
or music-drama.