There is one side of music which I am convinced has never
been fully studied, namely, the relation between it and
declamation. As we know, music is a language which may delineate
actual occurrences by means of onomatopoetic sounds. By the
use of more or less suggestive sounds, it may bring before
our minds a quasi-visual image of things which we more or less
definitely feel.
Now to do all this, there must be rules; or, to put it more
broadly, there must be some innate quality that enables
this art of sounds to move in sympathy with our feelings.
I have no wish to go into detailed analysis of the subject;
but a superficial survey of it may clear up certain points with
regard to the potency of music that we are too often willing
to refer back to the mere pleasing physical sensations of sound.
Some consideration of this subject may enable us to understand
the much discussed question of programme music. It may also help
us to recognize the astonishing advance we have made in the art;
an advance, which, strange to say, consists in successively
throwing off all the trammels and conventionalities of what is
generally considered artificial, and the striking development
of an art which, with all its astounding wealth of exterior
means, aims at the expression of elemental sensations.
Music may be divided into four classes, each class marking
an advance in receptive power on the part of the listener and
poetic subtlety on that of the composer. We may liken the first
stage to that of the savage Indians who depict their exploits
in war and peace on the rocks, fragments of bone, etc. If the
painter has in mind, say, an elephant, he carves it so that its
principal characteristics are vastly exaggerated. A god in such
delineation is twice the size of the ordinary man, and so it is
in descriptive music. For instance, in Beethoven's "Pastoral"
symphony, the cuckoo is not a bird which mysteriously hides
itself far away in a thicket, the sound of whose voice comes to
one like a strange, abrupt call from the darkness of the forest;
no, it is unmistakably a cuckoo, reminding one strangely of
those equally advanced and extremely cheap art products of
Nuremberg, made of pine wood, and furnished with a movable tail.
The next stage is still a question of delineation; but
of delineation that leads us into strange countries, and
the sounds we hear are but the small door through which we
pass. This music _suggests_; by way of example, the opening of
the last movement of the "Pastoral" symphony, the march from
Tchaikovsky's "Symphonie Pathetique," the opening of Raff's
"Im Walde," and Goldmark's "Sakuntala." Such music hints,
and there is a certain potency in its suggestion which makes
us see things. These two divisions of music have been termed
"programme" or "objective" music.
The other two classes of music have been termed subjective.
The first is declamation, pure and simple; the singer may be
telling a lie, or his sentiment may be insincere or false; what
these sounds stand for, we know from the words, their grade of
passion, etc. The last phase of our art is much more subtle,
and is not amenable to such accurate analysis. If we may liken
music to painting, we may, I think, compare the latter to the
first three stages of this new language of music; but it can
go no further. For that art must touch its audience through
a palpable delineation of something more or less material;
whereas music is of the stuff dreams are made of. It is hardly
necessary to say, however, that our dreams are often much more
poignant than the actual sensations caused by real occurrences
would be. And it is because of this strange quality, I think,
that dreams and music affect us in much the same manner.
The vital principle of Wagner's art was that he not only made
startlingly vivid pictures in his music, but that he made the
people in these pictures actually walk out of the frame and
directly address the audience. In other words, his orchestra
forms a kind of pictorial and psychological background from
which his characters detach themselves and actually speak. If
they speak falsely, the ever present orchestra, forming as it
were a halo, unmercifully tears away the mask, like the mirror
in old fairy tales.
In Wagner's operas, however, the intrusion of gross palpable
machinery of the stage, as well as that of the actor's art,
too often clouds the perfect working of this wonderful art
conception. It is just this intrusion of materialism in Wagner's
music dramas which constitutes their only weakness.
At this point I wish to insist upon the fact that in music it
is always through declamation that the public is addressed most
directly; not only that, but declamation is not necessarily tied
by any of the fetters of the spoken word; nor is it subservient
to any of the laws of articulate speech as we meet with them in
language. This being admitted, I have no hesitation in giving
my opinion that opera, or rather the music drama, is not the
highest or the most perfect form of our art. The music drama
as represented by Wagner (and he alone represents it) is the
most perfect union of painting, poetry, and music imaginable to
our nineteenth-century minds. But as regards representing the
highest development of music, I find it too much hampered by
the externals of art, necessary materialism in the production
of palpable acts, and its enforced subjection to the laws that
govern the spoken word.
Music is universal; Wagner's operas, by the inherent necessities
of speech, are necessarily and irrevocably Germanic. "Les
Maitres Chanteurs," "The Dwarfs of Niebelheim," "Elizabeta,"
are impossibilities, whereas, for instance, Beethoven's "Eroica"
labours under no such disadvantage. "Goodbye, My Dearest Swan,"
invests part of "Lohengrin" with a certain grotesque colour
that no one would ever dream of if there were no necessity for
the singer to be tied down to the exigencies of palpable and
certainly most materialistic language. The thought in itself
is beautiful, but the necessity for the words drags it into
the mud.
This certainly shows the difference between the language of
music and what is called articulate speech, the purely symbolic
and artificial character of the latter, and the direct,
unhampered utterance of the former. Music can invariably
heighten the poignancy of mere spoken words (which mean
nothing in themselves), but words can but rarely, in fact I
doubt whether they can ever, heighten the effect of musical
declamation. To my mind, listening to Wagner's operas may be
likened to watching a circus with three rings. That containing
the music should have our closest attention, for it offers
the most wonderful sounds ever imagined by any man. At the
same time it is impossible for any human being not to have his
attention often lured away to the other rings, in one of which
Fricke's rams vie with the bird and the dragon; or where the
phantom ship seems as firmly fixed as the practical rainbow,
which so closely betrays the carpenter. In the other ring you
can actually hear the dull jokes of Mimi and the Wanderer,
or hear Walther explain that he has passed a comfortable night
and slept well.
The music to these remarkable scenes, however, does not deign
to stoop so low, but soars in wonderful poetry by itself, thus
rejecting a union which, to speak in the jargon of our day, is
one of the convincing symptoms of decadence; in other words,
it springs from the same impulse as that which has produced
the circus with three rings.
Summing up, I wish to state what I consider the four elements
of music, namely, music that paints, music that suggests, music
that actually speaks, and music that almost defies analysis,
and is composed of the other three elements.
When we were considering the early works for harpsichord, I said
that music could define certain things with quite reasonable
exactitude. Just as in the Egyptian hieroglyphics a wavy line
stands for water, so it can in music, with the latitude that
it can mean anything in nature that we might consider of the
same genre. Thus, the figure in Wagner's "Waldweben" means in
that instance waves of air, and we know it by the context.
His swaying figure of the "Prelude to Rheingold" is as
plainly water as is the same figure used by Mendelssohn in his
"Lovely Melusina." Not that Wagner plagiarized, but that he and
Mendelssohn recognized the definiteness of musical suggestions;
which is more than proved by their adopting the same musical
ideas to indicate the same things.
More indefinite is the analysis of our second type or element
of music. The successful recognition of this depends not only
upon the susceptibility of the hearer to delicate shades of
sensation, but also upon the receptivity of the hearer and his
power to accept freely and unrestrictedly the mood shadowed
forth by the composer. Such music cannot be looked upon
objectively. To those who would analyze it in such a manner it
must remain an unknown language; its potency depends entirely
upon a state of willing subjectivity on the part of the hearer.
The third element, as we know, consists of the spoken word or
phrase; in other words, declamation. In this, however, the
composer cuts loose entirely from what we call language. It
is the medium of expression of emotion of every kind. It is
not restricted to the voice or to any instrument, or even to
our sharps, flats, and naturals. Through stress of emotion the
sharps become sharper, with depression the flats become flatter,
thus adding poignancy to the declamation. Being unfettered by
words, this emotion has free rein. The last element, as I have
said, is extremely difficult to define. It is declamation that
suggests and paints at the same time. We find hardly a bar
of Wagner's music in which this complex form of music is not
present. Thus, the music dramas of Wagner, shorn of the fetters
of the actual spoken word, emancipated from the materialism
of acting, painting, and furniture, may be considered as the
greatest achievement in our art, an art that does not include
the spoken word called poetry, or painting, or sculpture,
and most decidedly not architecture (form), but the essence
of all these. What these aim to do through passive exterior
influences, music accomplishes by actual living vibration.