II

Of all the arts, music is the one whose ideal of form is the loftiest,

the most exacting, the most imperative; the art in which we are least

willing to tolerate any defection from the highest we can conceive.

This, indeed, has been the cause both of the rapid development of music

in comparison with the other arts, and of the frenetic warfare of the

schools in one generation after another. The intensity of the great

musician's desire for ideal perfection in his art leads to his carrying

it, within a few years, over a curve of evolution that it takes a

century for the other arts to describe. This æsthetic concentration

gave us the Beethoven symphony and the Wagner music-drama--each the

most perfect thing of its kind, each the most perfect expression of

the musical needs of the generation that brought it into life. At the

same time this principle of evolution has caused the world, when it

discovered how absolutely complete was the musician's achievement of

the particular thing he had aimed at, to desire to rest permanently

in that form, to regard it as the final word in music. It was so with

the symphony according to Beethoven, and with the opera according to

Wagner. Now what we have to recognise in the case of Richard Strauss is

that he is the destroyer--or at any rate, the symbol of destruction--of

all previous values, as Nietzsche would say, and the creator at once of

a new expression and a new form.

Music could no more stop at Wagner than it could stop at Bach, Gluck,

or Beethoven. The expansion of manner which music underwent at the

hands of each of these men, be it noted, was the fruit of a correlative

expansion of the mental world of the musician--not the individual

musician, but the type. The great interest of Wagner for many of us is

that with him, for the first time, music aimed at becoming co-extensive

with human life. (So much, I think, may be broadly postulated without

entering on very contentious grounds, if we complete the proposition by

saying that Berlioz and Liszt--the Liszt of the twelve symphonic poems,

the _Dante_ symphony and the _Faust_ symphony--are to be understood

as subsumed under Wagner.) But the very element in his work that made

Wagner an unquestionable evolution from Beethoven--the clear perception

that in the symphony pure and simple you could never, do what you

would, advance entirely out of the decorative into the human, that to

concern herself more pointedly with man and the world, music must call

in the aid of poetry, with its wider and deeper associations with

human life--this was at the same time, curiously enough, the element

that marked the limits of the opera and foretold its ultimate passing

away. Opera, it is now evident, is _not_ the form of either the present

or the future. It was once the revolutionary form, and under its red

banner men imbrued their hands with the gore of their fellow-men; now

it is a classic, and in twenty years we shall have a school that quotes

its Wagner against the new troublers of our musical conventions as a

former school quoted Mozart and Beethoven against Wagner. And why is

the opera now beginning to be recognised as a limited form, instead of

the universal form which Wagner fondly hoped to make it? Simply because

it has now become clear to us that the admixture of the human voice

in music really limits the range of the art as much as the absence

of it formerly limited the symphony. What the old music needed was

fertilisation by speech, as Wagner never wearied of telling us; what

music at present needs is emancipation from the tyranny of speech. A

glance at the æsthetic of the art will make this seem less paradoxical

than it sounds at first.

As I have tried to show in another essay in this volume, the people

who despise programme music as a derogation from the high nature and

pure origin of the art are labouring under a delusion. Music, they say,

ought to be able to stand alone, in splendid isolation as it were;

and they regard it as a sign of musical weakness when a composer,

associating himself with the literary element of poetry, "calls in to

his aid a foreign art," as they express it. All this is based upon a

misunderstanding of the real essence of music, and a faulty analysis

of the psychological states from which it has sprung. From the very

infancy of the art, there have been two main impulses stimulating

the musician--the abstract and the human, the decorative and the

poetic. The fact that these two are almost always interblended, in

one proportion or another, in the actual music we know, does not in

any way upset the analysis. Broadly speaking, the revolution effected

by Wagner was precisely an infusion of a greater human pre-occupation

into an art that had previously been over-intent on the architectural

or decorative. He saw that it was impossible for a modern man to

say all he wanted to say in a form that attributed relatively too

much importance to the propriety of the pattern, and left too little

opportunity for the sleuth-like tracking of thoughts as fluid, as

complex, as evasive as life itself. On the one hand the transition

had to be made from inarticulate to articulate tone, from music as a

generalised expression to music as a particularised expression of life;

and this could only be done by conquering for her, by means of speech,

a new territory of human interests in which she was to be supreme.

On the other hand, there had to be a general break-up of the older

official form, and a general discarding of useless garments in order

that the limbs of this fresh young art might move more freely. What

Wagner's achievement was we know. Apart from his stupendous musical

gifts, he will live by the closeness of the bearing of his thought

upon actual life; for he was searchingly real, albeit in his own

semi-romantic way.

But the impetus given to music by Wagner could not end where he desired

it to end. Already, in his own lifetime, Berlioz and Liszt had hit upon

a form of symphonic poem, which, had it not been for the overwhelming

vogue of Wagner's operas, would probably have come to be recognised

as the pre-eminent form of the nineteenth century. It must always be

remembered that Liszt was no mere imitator of Wagner, but that they

worked separately for many years on much the same general æsthetic

lines--Liszt being, if anything, the one of the twain who saw first the

new possibilities of modern music. Now that Wagner's work is done and

become a thing of the past--the art-form which he perfected having died

with him, so far as we can see at present--the long-submerged trail of

Liszt is making its reappearance. Despised as a composer in his own

epoch, he is now having a posthumous and vicarious justification in

Richard Strauss. Like the river Arethusa, that was lost in one place

and came to light again in another, the peculiar psychology of the

symphonic poem according to Liszt re-emerges in _Tod und Verklärung_

and _Also sprach Zarathustra_, after having been hidden for half a

century by the more lyrical, less "representative" art of _Tristan_ and

the _Meistersinger_. The strong point of Strauss is just that he has

shown how often speech can with the greatest advantage be discarded

in music, because speech, while a fertilising element up to a certain

point, becomes a positive obstruction when once that point has been

passed. Where there are words there is necessarily a human voice, and

where there is a voice you are necessarily bound by the limitations

of the voice, and shut out from one-half of the circle of life. You

can, of course, accept these limitations as far as the voice itself

is concerned, and leave to the orchestra the portrayal of things that

are too vast, too mysterious, or too terrible to be sung--which was

the method of Wagner. But the success of this system depends upon the

quality of your subject; and when you come to the big modern material,

and desire to look through music at the life and the philosophy of your

own day, you will find that the voice is, as often as not, a hindrance.

A subject like _Also sprach Zarathustra_, for example, neither demands

nor would tolerate the human voice in a musical setting of it.

Nietzsche's book is not lyrical, not dramatic; it is--or purports to

be--a piece of philosophy, a reflection upon the cosmos as it appears

to a bitter, disillusioned modern man. In weaving music into a gigantic

scheme like this, the tiny egoistic tinkle of the human voice would be

a ludicrous descent into bathos.[60] We have only to look round at

the music of the past hundred years to see that, as its psychology

extended, it first of all required speech to gain it access to one

new territory, and then had to throw over speech in order to secure

entrance into a territory still more remote and more mysterious. This

is the environment towards which Strauss has had to feel his way

through one experiment after another.

Now just as Wagner's music, though more complex than the old art in

certain respects, was simpler than the old in that it substituted a

natural for a stilted form of operatic speech--a revolution similar to

that effected in English poetry by the lyrical writers of the end of

the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries--so Strauss

represents yet another movement towards naturalness, when compared

with contemporary music-makers like Brahms or even Tchaikovski. The

proof of this is writ large over almost all his music, from opus 5

onwards; it is visible everywhere, in his melodies, his rhythms,

his harmonies, his _facture_. Now and again, of course, there is

a lapse into the polite formalities which come so fatally easy to

the musician of all artists. But on the whole Strauss gives one the

impression of a singularly fresh and unconventional temperament, whose

new mode of vision spontaneously generates its own new manner of

utterance. The peculiar quality of his mature style is its absolute

_Selbstständigkeit_--its entire independence, throughout its whole

texture, of any laws but its own. I need not speak of his marvellous

orchestration, for his overlordship there is unquestionable. But

we need only look at his harmonies--those harmonies which are the

horror of a great many people who are by no means academics--to see

how supremely natural, how infinitely remote from the mere desire to

stagger humanity,[61] is the style of Strauss even in its most defiant

moments.[62] What was said of old of the harmonies of Wagner is now

being said of the harmonies of his successor. I will frankly admit

that there are certain things among them which are a cruel laceration

of our ears--things at which we can only cross ourselves piously, as

at the profanity of the natural man at the street corner, and hurry

on our way. These deviations from the normal are mostly to be seen in

his songs, where he permits himself a much broader license than in

any of his other works. For the rest, it will be found that, a few

eccentricities apart, our first prejudice against most of his novel

harmonies and progressions is due simply to their unexpectedness,

and that as soon as we have grown accustomed to them they seem quite

logical and inevitable. Undoubtedly our palate for harmony has been

cloyed by too much of the saccharine; the tonic, astringent quality of

the discord has not yet been sufficiently appreciated by any musician

but Strauss. Like all other superstitions, the harmonic superstition

cannot survive the bold experimenter. One's faith in the malign powers

that dog the footsteps of him who walks under a ladder, or spills

the salt at table, receives a rude shock when we find a man tempting

Providence in this way and coming to no particular harm; and many

things in music that we would _à priori_ pronounce impossible look

quite simple and natural when they are actually done. To end a big

orchestral work with reiterated successions of the chord of B natural

followed by the tonic of C natural seems like a device of Colney

Hatch; but it is strangely suggestive and hugely impressive in _Also

sprach Zarathustra_. Of course the invention and elaboration of a new

technique are very difficult matters; and it is only to be expected

that here and there Strauss should give us the impression of not

being quite at home even in his own territory. Nothing could be more

audacious, or, as a rule, more successful, than his bland persistence

in a certain figure or a certain sequence when the chances are all in

favour of the thing toppling down like a house of cards long before he

can reach the summit; there is something positively grim and eerie,

at times, in the _nonchalant_ way Strauss steers his bark through all

the dangers of the musical deep. In the lovely song _Ich schwebe_ (op.

48, No. 2), for example, one is alternately astonished and amused at

the freedom of the harmonic sequences; one hardly knows whether to be

angry at the cool unconventionality with which we are being treated,

or to chuckle with delight at the sheer impudence of the performance.

Strauss seems to think it a fallacy to look upon chords as being built

up from a certain base. In a way, his system is a reversion to the

view of the old contrapuntists, that music is a matter of a series of

horizontal lines, not of the vertical lines into which the thoughts of

the modern harmonist have come to flow. Substitute horizontal figures

or groups for horizontal lines, and we have the distinction between the

harmonic Strauss in his more daring moments, and, say, the harmonic

Tchaikovski. A certain sequence of chords has to be carried through,

willy-nilly, in one part of the piano or of the orchestra; another

and quite independent sequence has to be carried through, willy-nilly,

in another part. They are heard against each other at every point

of their career. If they blend, according to the current notions of

harmony, well and good; if they do not, equally well and good. You are

only shocked for the moment, says Strauss, because your ear has become

sophisticated, artificialised, by dwelling too long in the conventional

harmonic atmosphere that has been manufactured for you; you must learn

to breathe a new atmosphere, to take delight in a new type of musical

sequence, wherein opposing notes or opposing chords go each to its

own appointed end, regardless of isolated harmonic effects, or of

certain cramping formalities known as "resolutions." We have to learn

to think horizontally. In musical matters, however, it takes even the

most advanced of us a little time to readjust our point of view; and

whether it is that we are not yet quite worthy of the light of the

new dispensation, or whether the voice of the prophet fails him at

times and his speech becomes a little thick and his thought a trifle

incoherent, it is certain that Strauss now and again tries our patience

somewhat. Here and there in _Ein Heldenleben_ and some of the maddest

of the songs we feel that no amount of familiarity with the music will

ever make us like certain effects--or defects--of harmony; and even in

a great song like the _Traum durch die Dämmerung_ (op. 29, No. 1) we

have an uneasy feeling, at more than one point, that instead of Strauss

being the master he has become the servant of his material. There is

just a suspicion, here and there, that he is working his pre-ordained

sequence a shade too rigidly, and that he would have gained by relaxing

it a little. In any case, as I have already remarked, it is generally

in his songs--which, beautiful as they are, are not the most important

part of his work--that his harmonic system is most apt to take our

breath away; though I cannot agree with a recent writer that the

harmonies are merely "wild experimentation." In ninety-nine cases

out of a hundred they seem to me perfectly spontaneous, even when

they are most trying; I think Strauss writes precisely as he feels,

without any mere attempt, in cold blood, to achieve the unexpected

or the impossible. One frequent cause of the novelty of his harmonic

progressions is that he resolves the constituent tones of his chords

in any part of the gamut he chooses. This, of course, is only a

continuance of a tendency that has been going on in music for the last

hundred years; and Wagner and Liszt have made certain resolutions of

this kind so familiar to us that they now excite no comment. In another

half-century the majority of the new harmonies and new resolutions of

Strauss will probably be part of the common vocabulary of every musical

penny-a-liner.

Whatever may be thought, however, of the sincerity or artificiality of

his harmonies, there can be no question that in his melodies and his

rhythms he is pre-eminently natural and unforced. Once he had got rid

of the suspicion of mediocrity that hung about him in his earlier

works, owing to his having momentarily taken up with the wrong artistic

company, he made rapid progress along a line that was peculiarly his

own. No one can listen to _Don Juan_, for example (op. 20), without

feeling how exquisitely fresh is the work, how absolutely adolescent

in the best sense. Here for the first time we have a revelation of

what the future Strauss was to be--the writer of a new music, in which

the expression and the technique shall follow the poetic idea with an

unquestioning, unswerving fidelity. He is now acquiring an instrument

of speech that, in its power to bite into the essentials of an object,

reminds us of the consummate style of Flaubert or Maupassant; the

realist Strauss is coming into view. All the previous works of any

importance--the Symphony in F minor (op. 12), the String Quartet (op.

13), the _Wanderers Sturmlied_ (op. 14), _Aus Italien_ (op. 16), and

the Violin Sonata (op. 18)--had been preliminary studies for this. In

these works we see Strauss finally emerging from the slough of polite

acquiescence in the manners of his forerunners which had been now and

then painfully evident in the _Fünf Klavierstücke_ (op. 3) and the

_Stimmungsbilder_ (op. 9), and even at times in the virile, breezy

Piano Sonata (op. 5). He gradually forms a musical style of his own,

in which the idiom is extraordinarily spontaneous and forceful. The

melody becomes more serpentiform, more flexibly articulated, more and

more independent, in its rhythm, of the four or eight-bar props upon

which composers generally find it so convenient to lean. I do not

refer so much to the mere crossing or interlocking of rhythms which

the _Wanderers Sturmlied_ and _Also sprach Zarathustra_ exhibit here

and there, for this is more or less an affair of merely conscious

technique, which may, as is frequently the case in Brahms, exist rather

on paper than in actuality, and make more impression on the eye than on

the ear. The rhythmical interest of the juvenile works of Strauss lies

rather in the growing sense of perfect freedom and naturalness in the

trajectory of the melodies. All the new qualities of the works that lie

between opus 12 and opus 18 come to their fine fruition in _Don Juan_,

which is the first work of Strauss that shows in something like its

entirety the true psychology, æsthetic and moral, of the man.