In the old-fashioned opera every separate number involved the
composition of a fresh melody; but it is quite a mistake to suppose that
this creative-effort extended continuously throughout the number from
the first to the last bar. When a musician composes according to a set
metrical pattern, the selection of the pattern and the composition
of the first stave (a stave in music corresponds to a line in verse)
generally completes the creative effort. All the rest follows more
or less mechanically to fill up the pattern, an air being very like a
wall-paper design in this respect. Thus the second stave is usually a
perfectly obvious consequence of the first; and the third and fourth an
exact or very slightly varied repetition of the first and second. For
example, given the first line of Pop Goes the Weasel or Yankee Doodle,
any musical cobbler could supply the remaining three. There is very
little tune turning of this kind in The Ring; and it is noteworthy that
where it does occur, as in Siegmund's spring song and Mimmy's croon,
"Ein zullendes Kind," the effect of the symmetrical staves, recurring
as a mere matter of form, is perceptibly poor and platitudinous compared
with the free flow of melody which prevails elsewhere.
The other and harder way of composing is to take a strain of free
melody, and ring every variety of change of mood upon it as if it were
a thought that sometimes brought hope, sometimes melancholy, sometimes
exultation, sometimes raging despair and so on. To take several themes
of this kind, and weave them together into a rich musical fabric
passing panoramically before the ear with a continually varying flow of
sentiment, is the highest feat of the musician: it is in this way that
we get the fugue of Bach and the symphony of Beethoven. The admittedly
inferior musician is the one who, like Auber and Offenbach, not to
mention our purveyors of drawing-room ballads, can produce an unlimited
quantity of symmetrical tunes, but cannot weave themes symphonically.
When this is taken into account, it will be seen that the fact that
there is a great deal of repetition in The Ring does not distinguish it
from the old-fashioned operas. The real difference is that in them the
repetition was used for the mechanical completion of conventional
metric patterns, whereas in The Ring the recurrence of the theme is
an intelligent and interesting consequence of the recurrence of the
dramatic phenomenon which it denotes. It should be remembered also
that the substitution of symphonically treated themes for tunes with
symmetrical eight-bar staves and the like, has always been the rule in
the highest forms of music. To describe it, or be affected by it, as
an abandonment of melody, is to confess oneself an ignoramus conversant
only with dance tunes and ballads.
The sort of stuff a purely dramatic musician produces when he hampers
himself with metric patterns in composition is not unlike what might
have resulted in literature if Carlyle (for example) had been compelled
by convention to write his historical stories in rhymed stanzas. That
is to say, it limits his fertility to an occasional phrase, and three
quarters of the time exercises only his barren ingenuity in fitting
rhymes and measures to it. In literature the great masters of the art
have long emancipated themselves from metric patterns. Nobody claims
that the hierarchy of modern impassioned prose writers, from Bunyan
to Ruskin, should be placed below the writers of pretty lyrics, from
Herrick to Mr. Austin Dobson. Only in dramatic literature do we find the
devastating tradition of blank verse still lingering, giving factitious
prestige to the platitudes of dullards, and robbing the dramatic style
of the genuine poet of its full natural endowment of variety, force and
simplicity.
This state of things, as we have seen, finds its parallel in musical
art, since music can be written in prose themes or in versified tunes;
only here nobody dreams of disputing the greater difficulty of the prose
forms, and the comparative triviality of versification. Yet in dramatic
music, as in dramatic literature, the tradition of versification clings
with the same pernicious results; and the opera, like the tragedy, is
conventionally made like a wall paper. The theatre seems doomed to be
in all things the last refuge of the hankering after cheap prettiness in
art.
Unfortunately this confusion of the decorative with the dramatic element
in both literature and music is maintained by the example of great
masters in both arts. Very touching dramatic expression can be combined
with decorative symmetry of versification when the artist happens to
possess both the decorative and dramatic gifts, and to have cultivated
both hand in hand. Shakespeare and Shelley, for instance, far from being
hampered by the conventional obligation to write their dramas in verse,
found it much the easiest and cheapest way of producing them. But if
Shakespeare had been compelled by custom to write entirely in prose, all
his ordinary dialogue might have been as good as the first scene of As
You Like It; and all his lofty passages as fine as "What a piece of
work is Man!", thus sparing us a great deal of blank verse in which the
thought is commonplace, and the expression, though catchingly turned,
absurdly pompous. The Cent might either have been a serious drama or
might never have been written at all if Shelley had not been allowed to
carry off its unreality by Elizabethan versification. Still, both
poets have achieved many passages in which the decorative and dramatic
qualities are not only reconciled, but seem to enhance one another to a
pitch otherwise unattainable.
Just so in music. When we find, as in the case of Mozart, a prodigiously
gifted and arduously trained musician who is also, by a happy accident,
a dramatist comparable to Moliere, the obligation to compose operas in
versified numbers not only does not embarrass him, but actually saves
him trouble and thought. No matter what his dramatic mood may be, he
expresses it in exquisite musical verses more easily than a dramatist of
ordinary singleness of talent can express it in prose. Accordingly, he
too, like Shakespeare and Shelley, leaves versified airs, like Dalla sua
pace, or Gluck's Che fare senza Euridice, or Weber's Leise, leise, which
are as dramatic from the first note to the last as the untrammelled
themes of The Ring. In consequence, it used to be professorially
demanded that all dramatic music should present the same double aspect.
The demand was unreasonable, since symmetrical versification is no merit
in dramatic music: one might as well stipulate that a dinner fork should
be constructed so as to serve also as a tablecloth. It was an ignorant
demand too, because it is not true that the composers of these
exceptional examples were always, or even often, able to combine
dramatic expression with symmetrical versification. Side by side
with Dalla sua pace we have Il mio tesoro and Non mi dir, in which
exquisitely expressive opening phrases lead to decorative passages which
are as grotesque from the dramatic point of view as the music which
Alberic sings when he is slipping and sneezing in the Rhine mud is from
the decorative point of view. Further, there is to be considered the
mass of shapeless "dry recitative" which separates these symmetrical
numbers, and which might have been raised to considerable dramatic and
musical importance had it been incorporated into a continuous musical
fabric by thematic treatment. Finally, Mozart's most dramatic finales
and concerted numbers are more or less in sonata form, like symphonic
movements, and must therefore be classed as musical prose. And sonata
form dictates repetitions and recapitulations from which the perfectly
unconventional form adopted by Wagner is free. On the whole, there is
more scope for both repetition and convention in the old form than in
the new; and the poorer a composer's musical gift is, the surer he is to
resort to the eighteenth century patterns to eke out his invention.