(1) In the first place, given that music and poetry are to co-operate
to make one product, and given that the most perfect art-form is that
which makes a single, undivided, undistracting appeal to us, it follows
that the more intimately the two factors are blended the better the
result will be. There must be no little bit of music that hangs out,
as it were, and declines to meet the poetry on equal terms; there must
be no little bit of poetry that refuses to be amenable to musical
expression. The compromise must be perfect; there must be just so much
poetic purpose as is necessary to keep the musical utterance definite
and unmistakable, and just so much musical outpouring as is necessary
to lift _all_ the poetry into the ideal realm of Feeling; just so much
in each case and no more. There must be a complete "emotionalisation
of the intellect"; or, to use yet another of Wagner's phrases, we must
have "a truly unitarian" form. And in answer to the question, "Has
the poet to _restrict_ himself in presence of the musician, and the
musician in presence of the poet?" he says that they must not restrict
each other, "but rouse each other's powers into highest might, by
love...." " ... If the _poet's aim_--as such--is still at hand and
visible, then it has not as yet gone under into the Musical Expression;
but if the _Musician's Expression_--as such--is still apparent, then
it, in turn, has not yet been inspired by the Poetic Aim." In the
_Zukunftsmusik_ he puts the same idea in other words: the ideal text
can be achieved only by "that poet who is fully alive to Music's
tendency and exhaustless faculty of expression, and therefore drafts
his poem in such a fashion that it may penetrate the finest fibres of
the musical tissue, and the spoken _thought_ entirely dissolve into the
_Feeling_."
(2) In the second place, the new circumstances must sanction a new
form. What was quite right in the symphony, having regard to its
peculiar purpose, will be quite wrong in the music-drama, where the
purpose is altogether different. Nowhere, perhaps, is Wagner on
safer ground, or more illuminative in his reasoning, than he is
here. He shows how the symphony--like all purely abstract musical
utterances--must adopt certain definite formal methods of procedure
if it is to hang together at all. The growth of sonata-form in the
eighteenth century was determined not by the arbitrary desires of
individuals here and there, but by a deep underlying logic--a logic of
the emotions--that ran unconsciously through them and through their
hearers. It was this obscure, intuitive logic that made the need felt
for a second subject in contrast with the first, for an exposition
of these two subjects, for their working out, and for their final
recapitulation; it was this logic that determined the contrast of
character between the different movements. The kaleidoscope had to be
perpetually bringing the picture before us in new aspects; the essence
of dramatic working is _development_; the essence of "all forms arisen
from the March or Dance" is _change_. Thus the new form for dramatic
music must be sought in the nature of that _genre_, not in the nature
of a quite alien _genre_. In the essay _On Franz Liszt's Symphonic
Poems_, Wagner points out, as we have seen, how the laws of drama and
the laws of symphony are at variance. Let me quote the gist of his
remarks again. "It will be obvious that, in the conflict of a dramatic
idea with this (symphonic) form, the necessity must at once arise to
either sacrifice the development (the idea) to the alternation (the
form), or the latter to the former"; whereupon follows the criticism of
the _Leonora_ overture which I have already quoted. When he reaches
the point that a new form would have been necessary to allow free and
consistent play to Beethoven's ideas in the _Leonora_, he asks, "What,
now, would that form be?" and replies, "Of necessity a form dictated by
the subject of portrayal and its logical development."
Having briefly sketched out the two leading principles of Wagner's
theory, let us now leave the second, which is perfectly clear in itself
and in all its implications, and return to the first, the implications
of which are perhaps not quite so clear. Wagner himself held that as he
grew in artistic wisdom, his opera-poems came closer and closer to the
ideal form, in which there should be just as much music as the poetry
required, and just as much poetry as the music required. He admitted
that the poems of _Rienzi_, _The Flying Dutchman_, _Tannhäuser_, and
_Lohengrin_ were not quite all they should be; they were simply stages
in his evolution. But he was willing to submit the poem of _Tristan_
to the severest possible test of conformity with his ideal. "Upon that
work," he says, "I consent to your making the severest claims deducible
from my theoretic premisses: not because I formed it on any system,
for every theory was clean forgotten by me; but since here I moved
with fullest freedom and the most utter disregard of every theoretic
scruple...."
What now is the great advantage, according to Wagner's theory, that
the musical dramatist has over the poet or the novelist? Simply this,
that he can discard all the more or less uninspired matter that they
require in order to make their purpose clear, and plunge at once into
the heart of his subject. Take, as an example, this very poem of
_Tristan and Isolde_. The poet or the novelist, before he can begin to
move you, must descend to a relatively unemotional plane in order to
acquaint your understanding with certain positive facts it is essential
it should know. He must tell you who Tristan and Isolde were, when and
where they lived, what was their relation to the other people of the
drama, and a score of other things that can hardly be made emotional in
themselves. A long poem or drama is bound, by the nature of the case,
to have a certain amount of dross scattered about among its gold; the
beautiful appeals to Feeling are only made into a coherent story or
picture by the use of this less emotional tissue. From this difficulty
the musical dramatist escapes; in music he has a powerful engine that
enables him to dispense with all these mere wrappings of his Feeling,
and reach directly and immediately to the Feeling itself. He avoids
the arbitrary, and takes up his stand at once in the centre of the
"purely human." Thus Wagner needs no preliminary fumbling about for
_his_ tragedy; the first bar of the overture transports you at once
into the world and the mood to which the poet must drag you through
twenty explanatory pages. "All that detailed description and exhibition
of the historico-conventional which is requisite for making us clearly
understand the events of a given, remote historical epoch, and which
the historical novelist or dramatist of our times has therefore to
set forth at such exhaustive length--all this I could pass over." He
concerns himself not with historical subjects but with the simple myth
or legend, for "the legend, in whatever age or nation it occurs, has
the merit of seeing nothing but the purely human content of that age
and nation, and of giving forth that Content in a form peculiar to
itself, of sharpest outline, and therefore swiftly understandable."
The musician, in fact, must discard everything but the purely human;
he must take a poetical subject of which this is the core, and then
kindle it into incandescence by means of music. In _Tristan_, says
Wagner, "I plunged into the inner depth of soul-events, and from out
this inmost centre of the world I fearlessly built up its outward form.
A glance at the volume of this poem will show you at once that the
exhaustive detail-work which an historical poet is obliged to devote
to clearing up the outward bearings of his plot, to the detriment of a
lucid exposition of its inner motives, I now trusted myself to apply
to these latter alone. Life and death, the whole import and existence
of the outer world, here hang on nothing but the inner movements of
the soul." The object, of course, was--to recur to a previous order of
imagery--to reduce the amount of dross in the work and to increase the
amount of pure gold; all the available space ought to be devoted not to
demonstrations or recitals of fact but to the evocation of feelings,
to "exhibiting the inner springs of action, those inner soul-motives
which are finally and alone to stamp the Action as a _necessary_ one."
So much, then, is clear. Without questioning one of Wagner's
contentions--accepting his theory as true, without disagreeing with his
data or his reasoning--we come to these positions:--
a. Poetry without music is lacking in expression, in appeal to
Feeling: music without poetry is lacking in the power to give a
definite direction to Feeling.
b. An art-form therefore must be sought that will be an amalgam of
the two, with the advantages of each and the defects of neither.
c. In proportion as the advantages are retained and the defects
eliminated will the new art-form approach ideal perfection.
d. The musical defect to be guarded against is the attempt to
subject dramatic music to the laws of symphonic music: this is
easily overcome, and there only remains the poetic defect to be
avoided, _i.e._
e. All poetic or verbal material that cannot be "musicalised,"
or caught up into the spirit of music, is superfluous and harmful;
therefore in proportion as the music-drama is perfected will this
kind of material tend to disappear.
So far, so good. The point remaining to be considered is this: can
we _ever_ totally eliminate this non-musical material from opera?
Let us say, for example, in terms of the Wagnerian æsthetic, that a
good opera on the subject of Romeo and Juliet will be nearer artistic
perfection than Shakespeare's play, because it will dispense with
all the poet's clumsy methods of reaching the Feeling through the
viscous waters of the Understanding--that it will concern itself only
with the "purely human," with the "inner springs of action" of the
souls of the characters, and that it will raise these--to use a term
borrowed from electrical science--to the highest potential, the highest
incandescence. Granting all this, let us then press our question a
point further still. There will, let us admit, be less non-emotional
matter in the opera than in the drama, less hard, incalcitrant material
that cannot be emotionalised, but that has to be there because without
it the structure cannot hang together. Admitting that there will be
less of it, will any one venture to say that there will be _none_ of
it in the opera? I think not. _Â priori_ considerations apart, an
appeal to practical experience will soon disillusionise us. Of all
the thousands of operas that have been written since opera began,
not one, outside the works of Wagner, will pass successfully through
the ordeal. Of Wagner's operas, _Rienzi_, _The Flying Dutchman_,
_Tannhäuser_, and _Lohengrin_ are, by his own admission, as I have
already shown, put out of court. _The Ring_ will certainly not stand
the test; _Parsifal_ certainly will not; _The Mastersingers_ certainly
will not. There only remains _Tristan_, of the form and substance of
which he himself was justly proud. It will pass the judges with a
lighter sentence than any of the others; but will it be dismissed
without a stain on its character? By no means. Even in the pure,
dazzling, magnificent metal of _Tristan_ itself we find embedded, here
and there, a refractory piece of alien ore, of raw material not yet put
through the subtle alchemy that must divinise it. If then this last
straw fails us, where shall we look for salvation? The only answer can
be that _salvation on these lines is impossible_. Reduce the coarser,
explanatory, unemotional matter of opera--the merely utilitarian stuff,
the paste that binds the more precious things together--reduce this
as you will, _some_ of it you are still bound to retain in opera, for
without it opera cannot have enough intellectual, dramatic consistency
to ensure our getting hold of it. And if (1) granting the premisses,
the reasoning by which the Wagnerian theorem is supported has been
flawless, and (2) the brain that strove to embody that theorem in
practical art was an organ mightier than anything the sons of men are
likely to see for a very long time to come--then, I take it, there
is only one conclusion possible, that the failure occurs through
attempting to realise the theory in the wrong medium. To phrase it
differently, the logic of the case is not rigorously enough applied at
the last stage, when it comes to be pushed to its ultimate conclusion.
Always bearing in mind that, according to Wagner, the strong point of
the musical drama, as compared with any other poetic art-form, is that
the non-emotional matter in it can be reduced to a minimum, let us ask
ourselves whether a form cannot be found in which even this minimum can
be dispensed with. The answer will be that the necessary conditions
are united in the symphonic poem, which is therefore the true heir
of Wagner's theory, and has been too long kept out of its lawful
inheritance.
Two points now fall to be considered: (1) Can the affiliation of the
symphonic poem to the Wagnerian theory be properly established, and the
superiority of its rights of succession over those of its half-brother
opera be fully demonstrated; and (2) are there no defects, suggested by
Wagner himself, that unfit the symphonic poem to hold sway over opera?
The first point need not detain us long; least of all can the
thorough-going Wagnerian here have much right to protest. If Wagner's
reasoning is right his conclusion must be accepted--namely, that the
less waste matter you have in your poetic music the better. Now he
himself attributed the failure to "musicalise" the poetic subject
completely to this cause, that instead of addressing the Feeling we
were too prone to address the Understanding. He tells us, too, that
_words_ are the channel through which the Understanding operates.
In all cases, then, where words are employed, there is a strong
probability of their carrying us with them further along the path of
mere Understanding than the ideal art requires; and diminish this
feature as much as you can, some of it is still bound to persist. So
that your only resort is to find a form that shall make use of all the
advantages of poetic music and keep clear of this one defect. This form
is unquestionably the symphonic poem. It _does_ eliminate the defects
that attend the use of words, for it dispenses with words; it meets
Wagner's demand that music shall not sing merely for its own sake, but
for a poetic purpose; it can order its structure upon the same lines
as opera, _i.e._ the themes are conceived at once in terms of musical
beauty and in terms of poetic appropriateness, and they suggest, by the
modifications they undergo, the changing aspect of the personages and
scenes of the drama. A symphonic poem is the concentrated essence of
opera; it is to the opera as Bovril is to the ox.
But Wagner himself, it may be said, expressly warned us against
programme music as being an artistic error. That is quite true.
Wagner's argumentation here, however, is exceptionally weak. It is
clear that he had no properly thought-out principles to guide him at
this point. To begin with, his differentiation of programme music
from the symphonic poem is thoroughly fallacious. If programme music
is music based upon a programme--_i.e._ upon a literary subject--then
every symphonic poem, nay, every opera, necessarily belongs to that
category. The truth probably is that Wagner clung to this false
distinction because he thought it would help him out of an embarrassing
situation. He found himself compelled to say something publicly upon
Liszt's symphonic poems; and I am afraid his essay on that subject
is hardly a model of the ingenuous. To condemn Liszt was, of course,
impossible for many reasons. At all costs he had to be commended; but
if we critically examine the essay of eighteen pages, we shall find
that surprisingly little of it really deals with Liszt's work. There
is much declamation, and much æsthetic theorizing--most of it very
good; but surprisingly little rational criticism of Liszt's symphonic
poems. Practically all that Wagner does is (1) to admit the _â priori_
proposition that it is just as sensible to write a symphonic poem as
a symphony--he asks "whether March or Dance ... can supply a worthier
motive of form than, for instance, a mental picture of the ...
characteristic features in the deeds and sufferings of an Orpheus, a
Prometheus, and so forth," and whether it is not nobler for music to
take its Form "from an imagined Orpheus or Prometheus motive, than from
an imagined march or dance motive"; and (2) to contrast disparagingly
the procedure of Berlioz with that of Liszt. But the final impression
the essay leaves on me is that it was a duty which Wagner performed
rather unwillingly. He did not want to say too much for Liszt's music;
so on the one hand he argued that at any rate the symphonic poem was
permissible, and on the other hand that it was preferable to the
programme music of Berlioz.
Here his distinctions and his reasoning will not hold. He objected in
Berlioz, as we have seen, to the way in which the musician followed the
literary clues of his subject, without recasting these so as to fit
them in with a scheme that was _musically_ logical. Now it is absurd to
condemn programme music _en masse_ because a particular man blunders in
it; Berlioz may quite well be wrong[34] and programme music still be
right. But take Wagner's criticism as it stands, and correlate it with
the previous arguments of this paper, and what is the conclusion to be
drawn? Just this, that if Wagner could not, as he says, "hold on to
scenic motives not present" before his eye, he was not listening to the
music in the proper way. It is _not_ necessary, for most of us, to have
a poetic scene put visibly before us; we can easily reconstruct it in
imagination; and what the symphonic poem does is to give us the musical
feeling the opera aims at giving us, and to tell us to _imagine_ the
occasion of it all, instead of putting this occasion on a stage before
us. The prelude and finale of _Tristan_ constitute a rudimentary
symphonic poem, in the hearing of which we never ask to hear a word
or see an actor. A more explicit symphonic poem does the same thing
on a larger scale. We can, if we like, make a three-act opera out of
_Romeo and Juliet_, but on Wagner's own principles the essence of the
thing is contained in Tchaikovski's concert overture. And if I am
told that this theme is to be associated with the lovers, this with
Friar Lawrence, and so on, then during the playing of the overture the
whole drama is acted in my brain, and is quite as real for me as if I
beheld artificial men and women acting artificially in an artificial
stage-setting. So with _Ein Heldenleben_. Nothing would be easier than
to make an opera out of this subject; but who wants the opera, with
its eking out of the parts that really do matter with a number of
parts that really do not matter, with all its stage absurdities, its
posturing actors? We have the diffuse emotions of three or four hours
concentrated into the rich emotions of forty minutes. We have the whole
life of the hero just as we would get it in the opera; but the small
basket of strawberries has fewer pieces of grit in it than the bigger
basket.[35]
I hope I shall not be taken to mean that the opera is a false and
useless form, and that composers should henceforth all work frenziedly
at the manufacture of symphonic poems. My position is that for certain
purposes we _must_ have opera; by it alone can certain needs of our
soul be satisfied, just as--though Wagner did not know it--for the
satisfaction of other needs we must resort to pure poetry and pure
music. But for certain other satisfactions we must have recourse to the
symphonic poem; and this form, I contend, is the only form that can be
deduced logically from Wagner's own æsthetic theory. As I have tried
to show, in the symphonic poem alone can you get music fertilised by
a poetic purpose, and yet, by eliminating the actual words, avoid the
intrusion even of the minimum of non-emotional substance. In _The Ring
and the Book_, Browning describes how the artificer has to fashion a
gold ring. In order to make his material workable, he has to blend an
alloy with the gold; but when the circle is complete he drives out
the alloy with a spirt of acid, leaving the pure metal only. That
is the symphonic poem; the opera is the ring with the alloy left in
it. If perfection of form is what we want--the consummate, intimate
transfusion of matter and form, the "truly unitarian" form to which
Wagner aspired--then it is in the symphonic poem that we must look for
it, not in the opera.
Only one objection that Wagner might urge against this has, I believe,
not yet been considered. He expressly laid it down, it may be pointed
out, that it is _not_ sufficient for us to carry the external, moving,
concrete features of the drama in our heads; they must be set before
us, in the fulness of real life, on the stage. "Not a Programme," he
says in _Zukunftsmusik_, "which rather prompts the troublous question
'Why'?[36] than stills it--not a Programme, then, can speak the meaning
of the symphony; no, nothing but a stage performance of the Dramatic
Action itself."
This was an opinion he always maintained; but after all is it anything
more than a mere _obiter dictum_? Wagner had a passion for seeing
anything and everything upon the stage--a passion that at times becomes
rather childish, for he was quite unconscious of a number of the
absurdities of his characters and his situations that are painfully
evident to the audience. Truth to tell, his notions of the stage were
just a little crude at times; in any case he did not see that even
the best acting in opera is _per se_ bound to be inferior to the best
acting in drama--people cannot sing and at the same time be wholly
natural in demeanour. I take it, then, that his predilection for
stage-settings was a purely personal one; it has no logical relation to
his general æsthetic theory; and we can refuse to be bound by it. We
all like opera, and we tolerate its absurdities and its intellectual
deficiencies because we know these are inseparable from it; but once
more it has to be said that from these stage absurdities the symphonic
poem is free. Mr. Arthur Symons has recently pointed out the strain
that is put on our sense of the ridiculous when what should be merely
a symbol is thrust visibly before our eyes. The Stranger in Ibsen's
_Lady from the Sea_ is very impressive as a symbol of the call of the
sea to the blood of Ellida Wangel; but when an ordinary human being
in a tourist suit comes on the stage and purports to be the symbol
incarnate, our sense of the poetry of the thing is severely tried. So
with the scene where Wotan attempts to bar Siegfried's progress with
his spear, and Siegfried shatters it with his sword. This is all
very fine as a symbol of "the last ineffectual stand of constituted
authority against the young, untrammelled individuality of the future";
but what the candid eye sees on the stage is a young man chopping in
two a piece of stick held by an old man, who picks up the pieces,
walks off with them, and says, "Advance! I cannot stop thee!" What is
very impressive, merely conceived imaginatively as a symbol, becomes
unimpressive when narrowed down to ordinary men with legs and arms,
holding "property" swords and spears.
Opera, indeed, has no lack of absurdities, and this will always prevent
it taking rank as the highest form of dramatic art; and Wagner, as I
have said, must be held to have taken some of his own stage absurdities
and puerilities with quite abnormal seriousness. It stands to reason,
too, that the symphonic poem suffers from no such disabilities. If
Wagner's theory be correct, then a symphonic poem on a given subject
can follow, as regards its musical form, the lines laid down for it
by the poetic impulse, just as efficiently as an opera on the subject
could do; while it avoids the "padding" that is inseparable from
opera by simply giving us, in our programme, an outline of the poetic
subject, instead of daubing the subject over, from head to foot, with
pseudo-poetry that rarely rises above the level of rhymed or rhythmic
prose. As for the inability to follow the poetic motives of the subject
from the programme--well, I fancy we are not all so imperfectly endowed
with imagination as Wagner seems to have been here. I quite admit that
there are minds like his in this respect, to which poetic music conveys
little or nothing without speech and action--that are unable, while
they listen, say to _Ein Heldenleben_, to keep all the details of the
story moving at equal pace with the music; but the sufficient answer to
such people is that other people _can_ do this. To sum it all up, the
symphonic poem is theoretically deducible from Wagner's own æsthetic;
while in practice, if we miss in it some of the elements that make
opera interesting, we are compensated by the absence of other elements
that make opera tedious and absurd.