It is curious to note how often art-controversy has become edged with
a bitterness rivaling even the gall and venom of religious dispute.
Scholars have not yet forgotten the fiery war of words which raged
between Richard Bentley and his opponents concerning the authenticity
of the "Epistles of Phalaris," nor how literary Germany was divided into
two hostile camps by Wolf's attack on the personality of Homer. It is
no less fresh in the minds of critics how that modern Jupiter, Lessing,
waged a long and bitter battle with the Titans of the French
classical drama, and finally crushed them with the thunderbolt of the
"Dramaturgie;" nor what acrimony sharpened the discussion between
the rival theorists in music, Gluck and Piccini, at Paris. All of the
intensity of these art-campaigns, and many of the conditions of
the last, enter into the contest between Richard Wagner and the
_Italianissimi_ of the present day.
The exact points at issue were for a long time so befogged by the smoke
of the battle that many of the large class who are musically interested,
but never had an opportunity to study the question, will find an
advantage in a clear and comprehensive sketch of the facts and
principles involved. Until recently, there were still many people who
thought of Wagner as a youthful and eccentric enthusiast, all afire with
misdirected genius, a mere carpet-knight on the sublime battle-field
of art, a beginner just sowing his wild-oats in works like "Lohengrin,"
"Tristan and Iseult," or the "Rheingold." It is a revelation full of
suggestive value for these to realize that he is a musical thinker, ripe
with sixty years of labor and experience; that he represents the rarest
and choicest fruits of modern culture, not only as musician, but as poet
and philosopher; that he is one of the few examples in the history of
the art where massive scholarship and the power of subtile analysis
have been united, in a preeminent degree, with great creative genius.
Preliminary to a study of what Wagner and his disciples entitle the
"Artwork of the Future," let us take a swift survey of music as a medium
of expression for the beautiful, and some of the forms which it has
assumed.
This Ariel of the fine arts sends its messages to the human soul by
virtue of a fourfold capacity: Firstly, the imitation of the voices
of Nature, such as the winds, the waves, and the cries of animals;
secondly, its potential delight as melody, modulation, rhythm,
harmony--in other words, its simple worth as a "thing of beauty,"
without regard to cause or consequence; thirdly, its force of boundless
suggestion; fourthly, that affinity for union with the more definite
and exact forms of the imagination (poetry), by which the intellectual
context of the latter is raised to a far higher power of grace, beauty,
passion, sweetness, without losing individuality of outline--like,
indeed, the hazy aureole which painters set on the brow of the man
Jesus, to fix the seal of the ultimate Divinity. Though several or all
of these may be united in the same composition, each musical work may
be characterized in the main as descriptive, sensuous, suggestive, or
dramatic, according as either element contributes most largely to its
purpose. Simple melody or harmony appeals mostly to the sensuous love
of sweet sounds. The symphony does this in an enlarged and complicated
sense, but is still more marked by the marvelous suggestive energy
with which it unlocks all the secret raptures of fancy, floods the
border-lands of thought with a glory not to be found on sea or land,
and paints ravishing pictures, that come and go like dreams, with colors
drawn from the "twelve-tinted tone-spectrum."
Shelley describes this peculiar influence of music in his "Prometheus
Unbound," with exquisite beauty and truth:
"My soul is an enchanted boat,
Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float
Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing;
And thine doth like an angel sit
Beside the helm conducting it,
While all the waves with melody are ringing.
It seems to float ever, forever,
Upon that many-winding river,
Between mountains, woods, abysses,
A paradise of wildernesses."
As the symphony best expresses the suggestive potency in music, the
operatic form incarnates its capacity of definite thought, and the
expression of that thought. The term "lyric," as applied to the genuine
operatic conception, is a misnomer. Under the accepted operatic form,
however, it has relative truth, as the main musical purpose of opera
seems, hitherto, to have been less to furnish expression for exalted
emotions and thoughts, or exquisite sentiments, than to grant the vocal
_virtuoso_ opportunity to display phenomenal qualities of voice and
execution. But all opera, however it may stray from the fundamental
idea, suggests this dramatic element in music, just as mere lyricism
in the poetic art is the blossom from which is unfolded the full-blown
perfection of the word-drama, the highest form of all poetry.