MUSIC AS AN ART OF EXPRESSION
"Art generally ... as such, is nothing but a noble and expressive
language, invaluable as a vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing.
"Art, properly so called, is no recreation; it cannot be learned at
spare moments, nor pursued when we have nothing better to do. It is no
handiwork for drawing-room tables, no relief of the ennui of boudoirs;
it must be understood and undertaken seriously or not at all. To
advance it, men's lives must be given, and to receive it, their
hearts."
These words, among the first written for serious publication by John
Ruskin when he was a young graduate of Oxford, are the text of his
whole life's teaching.
"Daily and hourly," writes Carlyle, "the world natural grows out of a
world magical to me.... Daily, too, I see that there is no true poetry
but in reality."
More than two thousand years before Plato had written in the third
book of his _Republic_ against the indifference to manly virtue
and the cult of a languishing effeminacy in the poetry and art of his
day. He inveighs against the [Greek: panarmonia] and [Greek:
poluchodia] of the musicians, by which we may understand
over-instrumentation,--as if the Athenians even then had their
Berliozes and Strausses--and continues (I quote from Jowett's
translation): "Neither we nor our guardians whom we have to educate
can ever become musical until we and they know the essential forms of
temperance ([Greek: so¯phrosunae]), courage, liberality, magnificence
([Greek: megalorepeia]), and their kindred, etc."
The teaching of all these three great masters, and I might have
multiplied quotations from the works of the greatest--but only from
those of the greatest--thinkers of ancient and modern times, is the
same: that art is not a mere play of beautiful forms, but that the
artist must know a truth and have been able to express it; that his
work must be approved or condemned according as that truth is
healthful or the reverse. It is the doctrine of sincerity, and is
opposed to the common and weaker doctrine of "art for art's
sake"--i.e. that art is self-contained, that we occupy ourselves with
it solely for the pleasure which it affords through our senses, that
it has no didactic purpose. By this latter view, beauty in art is an
idea quite distinct from utility or morality; by the other, beauty,
utility, and morality are fundamentally one, being all emanations from
the one supreme Idea of creation named by Plato--"the Good," or "the
Good in itself," "the Idea of Good."
Can we apply this distinction to music? All the other arts derive
their subject-matter from the material world, but Polyhymnia seems to
detach herself from her sisters, to soar away from the things of this
earth, and to dwell in the ethereal regions of pure ideality. The
objects of painting, poetry, sculpture, etc., are those of our
surroundings; the artist only puts the things familiar to us in nature
in a new light, and, by concentrating the attention upon certain
aspects, reveals much that minds less poetic than his had not noticed
before. The morality which these arts are able to convey is the
morality of nature. But music is not concerned with any material
objects; its means are rhythm, melodic intervals, harmony, all purely
ideal existences, and seemingly all connected in some mysterious way
with number, itself an immaterial idea of time. And although the
manner of our perception of harmony has, to some extent, that of
melody to a still smaller extent, been explained in our time by
physiologists, the explanations only relate to the form of our
perception. They show how, through the harmonic overtones, the mind is
able to recognize the connection between a chord and the one which
preceded it, but cannot tell why one progression of harmonies is
pleasant, another the reverse, as Helmholtz himself was fully aware.
How then can it be possible for music to be a vehicle of thought? What
can it have to do with "temperance, courage, liberality"?
The question is not one which I can hope fully to answer within these
pages, but it cannot be altogether passed over; we must know something
of the nature of music, must have some clear notion of what it is if
we are to understand its relation to language in the drama. The
explanation given by Leibnitz that it is an _exercitium arithmeticae
occultum nescientis se numerare animi_ is quite inadequate. Music
is not a purely intellectual affection like that of number and
proportion, but is in the highest degree emotional. The pleasure which
we receive from contemplating a mathematical process of great
complexity is altogether different from that of music. Highly complex
as are the mathematical relations of the vibrations which convey
musical tones from the instrument to the ear the final result of those
relations, the impression on the rods of Corti's organ in the Cochlea,
are as purely physiological as the impressions of touch. Scientific,
i.e. inductive, research must always find an end at the point where
the organs become too small for observation; it can throw no light on
the nature of the impression transmitted from Corti's organ to the
consciousness.
A suggestion has been put forward by Schopenhauer which may be viewed
as an attempt to explain transcendentally the nature of music. It is
well known that, according to Schopenhauer, a work of art represents
the (Platonic) Idea of the object which it depicts, this Idea being
itself the first and highest stage of objectivation of Will. Music is,
however, a direct objectivation of Will, i.e. not through an Idea.
Music, therefore, is not like the other arts the image (Abbild) of an
Idea, but an image of the Will itself, of which the Ideas are also the
objectivity. This is why the impression which music makes upon us is
so much more powerful and more penetrating than that of the other
arts, for they tell only of the shadow, music of the substance. But
inasmuch as it is the same will that objectivates itself, only in
quite different ways in the Ideas and in music, so there results, not
indeed a _resemblance_, but rather a _parallelism_, an _analogy_
between music and the Ideas which appear in the world, multiplied
and imperfect as phenomena.
Beyond this we must not follow our author. Schopenhauer no doubt
possessed a very keen sense for music, but his theoretical education
was of the slightest, and his further remarks make the impression of
his having read up _ad hoc_ some theoretical writer of his time.
But we may accept his definition as at least a first step in the
inquiry.
The objective world lies before us in two forms, as light and as
sound. From the visible world of light we receive all the data for our
_understanding_, in the forms of time, space, and causality.
Beside it lies the world of sound, in time alone, and appealing
directly to our inner emotional consciousness, or, as we vaguely
express it, to the "_feelings_," which the light-world can only
reach indirectly through the understanding. Both these worlds are
fundamentally one, differing only in their manifestation, and, however
diverse they may appear, they are united by the element common to
both, Rhythm. In general the language of the understanding is
articulate speech, that of the emotions is music. The Unity subsisting
between these two worlds, of understanding and emotion, of language
and music, can only be realized intuitively; it can scarcely be
demonstrated. But we have vivid illustrations of it in many familiar
facts, for instance, that animals are able to make themselves
understood to us and to each other without articulate language, by
gesture and song. Thus we have the mutual relations of the two
dramatic elements. Shortly stated, words tell the story, music the
feelings of the persons. Gesture would seem to hold a place between
language and song, appealing to the emotions as directly, and
sometimes almost as forcibly as sound.[31] These relations are not so
sharply marked off from each other as appears in the analysis. In a
highly wrought organism each part, while keeping strictly to its own
functions, is nevertheless capable to some extent, when necessity
arises, of extending its field. It is like a well-disciplined army
where the duties of each unit are strictly laid down, but where the
units themselves possess intelligence and are capable when needful of
independent action, and a continual intercommunication between all the
parts ensures their harmonious working.
[Footnote 31: The reader who is interested will find the subject more
fully treated in Wagner's _Beethoven_.]
Applying what has been said to the drama let us select one incident of
our work, the tearing down of the torch by Isolde in the second act.
The words have told us that the torch is a signal of danger, and now
the sounds of the hunt having died away, its removal informs Tristan
that the way is clear for him to approach. More than this the poet
could scarcely do in the words. To have expatiated upon the awful
consequences which the lovers know full well must inevitably follow,
on the conflict of hope, awe, heroic resolution, defiance of the
certain death before them--to have told all this in words would have
necessitated a long speech, most unnatural and undramatic at such a
moment of tension, and could scarcely have avoided degenerating into
bombast. By a few simple transitions, a few devices of instrumentation,
the orchestra relates all this and much more, while Isolde's
flute-motive, so exquisitely graceful and tender in the preceding scene,
has now become a shriek of resolution bewildered but undaunted in the
supreme crisis, above the savage call of the trumpets to death. So far
the music; we _see_ in the torch hurled from its shining post and left
expiring on the ground, a symbol of the drama that is concentrated
in the act; of Tristan's glory extinguished in the realm of night. All
this in the scenic representation forms one issue, the different elements
coalescing in the hearer's mind into a single dramatic incident.
Wagner's view of the relation of music to words has been the subject
of much controversy, often unhappily very heated. Before Wagner the
common notion was that music in combination with words had only to
enforce them and to accentuate their declamation. Such was the view of
Gluck. As regards lyric productions, the setting of songs to music,
this principle may be sufficient, but the case is different when both
words and music are controlled by a dramatic action.
Another view places music in a class altogether by itself, apart from
the other arts, and unable to unite with them except in so far as to
employ them as its vehicle. Wherever music appears in company with
poetry, music must take the lead, must be governed by its own laws,
retain its own forms, while poetry, its compliant servant, must avoid
all higher expression and accommodate itself as best it can to the
music. So the highest form of music will be instrumental, where it is
unfettered by the ties of poetry.
A little work published in the fifties by the Vienna critic, Dr. E.
Hanslick, entitled _Vom musikalisch-Schönen_, discusses this
question very fully. It attained great celebrity at the time of its
publication and is still read. It is the best attempt that I have seen
to state theoretically the case against Wagner in sober and reasoned
language, and though it contains a few misunderstandings it is free
from offensive personalities and well worthy of attention. The author
is a disciple of that school of German aestheticians of which F. Th.
Vischer is the foremost representative.
According to Dr. Hanslick, music, being an art isolated from objective
nature, can never be anything but music. Whatever it expresses can
only be stated in terms of music; it can never present a definite
human "feeling." The essence of music is movement, and it can
represent certain dynamic ideas. Thus, although it can never express
love, hope, longing, etc., since those feelings involve a perception
(_Vorstellung_) or a concept (_Begriff_), things foreign to
its nature, it can represent given ideas as strong, weak, increasing,
diminishing, etc.--or as anything which is a function of time,
movement, and proportion. It can also _by analogy_ suggest in the
hearer the ideas of pleasing, soft, violent, elegant, and the like.
Whatever is beyond this is symbolical. Movement and symbolism are the
only means by which music can express anything. The notion that music
can express a definite feeling was, the author declares, universally
held by aestheticians at that time, and amongst those who held it he
seems to include Wagner. By way of exposing its fallacy he quotes the
air from Gluck's _Orpheus_:
[Music: J'ai per - du mon Eu - ri - di - ce-- rien n'é - ga - le mon
mal - heur.]
It would be possible, he says, to substitute words of an exactly
opposite meaning--
J'ai trouvé mon Euridice,
Rien n'égale mon bonheur--
without the music being affected in any way. This being so, he
continues, music can never unite with words to express any notion at
all, and the only form artistically admissible is absolute or
instrumental music. The pleasure which it imparts is the same as that
which we derive from a kaleidoscope, except in so far as it is
ennobled by the fact of its emanating from a human mind instead of
from a machine. The union of music with words is a morganatic
marriage, in which the words must suffer violence. With this the
author believes himself to have demolished Wagner's canon that in the
musical drama the music is only a means, the end being the drama.
Undoubtedly there is much truth in these observations. If for the
moment we confine our attention to instrumental music it is undeniable
that a musical melody in itself can never be anything but music.
Wagner himself has insisted that music attains all the fulness of
which it is capable as absolute or instrumental music, and as this
truth has been too often forgotten by composers, we have nothing but
gratitude for an author who once more strives to bring it into notice.
But it is only a one-sided truth, and insufficient. By the same rigid
reasoning it might be contended that a human face, being nothing but
modelling and colour, can never express anything but functions of
lines and forms, and colours. Everything in nature as well as in art
has for those who look below the surface a significance beyond its
external features. Nor does it follow that music will always remain
content with its own glorious isolation, that it will never seek for
union with other arts, sacrificing indeed its pristine purity, but
gaining mightily in warm human expression. Even in the heyday of
absolute music, in the instrumental compositions of Sebastian Bach, we
may notice this tendency, though here it is rather the dance than
poetry with which it strives to ally itself; while in Beethoven's
symphonies the yearning for human community and human fellowship is
noticeable from the first, and in the final work it breaks its bonds
and dissolves into song.
The primary error in Dr. Hanslick's argument is that it begins at the
wrong end, and tacitly assumes that art can be controlled by
theoretical speculations. An _a priori_ development of the theory
of art out of supposed first principles must in the end lead to
contradictions and absurdities, and every one must feel his conclusion
that the union of music and words is illegitimate--a view which, among
other things, would deprive us of Schubert's songs--to be an
absurdity. Had the inquiry commenced with familiar instances from
existing works of art in which music is felt to possess a very vivid
power of expression and then been carried backwards to find what it
can express and what not, and what are the conditions of its
expression, the results might have been valuable and we should have
been spared a dissertation resting wholly upon confusion of the
meaning of words. Here a definite meaning has been attached to the
word "feeling" (_Gefühl_); it is understood as including such
feelings as "hope," "love," "fear," etc. These, of course, music
cannot express. Wagner himself insists that music can never express a
_definite_ feeling, and even censures it as a "misunderstanding"
on the part of Beethoven that in his later works he attempted to do
so.[32] The best word to denote what music can express is that used by
Helmholtz--_Gemüthstimmung_--untranslatable into English, but for
which we may use the term "emotional mood" as denoting something
similar. It is a _tuning_ or a _tone_ of the mind, a _mood_ that music
expresses, and from a word of such vague meaning there is no risk
of false deductions being drawn.
[Footnote 32: Wagner, _Ges. Schr_., iii. 341; iv. 387.]
All our musical sense revolts against the dictum that music cannot
under any circumstances express a general feeling. Take, for example,
Agatha's outburst on seeing the approach of her lover Max in the
second act of _Der Freischütz_:
[Music: All' mei - ne Pul - se schla-gen, und das Herz wallt un - ge -
stüm, Süss ent - - zückt ent - ge - - - gen ihm,.... etc.]
Would it be possible to hear this passage and not feel the melody as
a direct and most vivid expression of joy?--joy, that is, in the
abstract, but not a definite joy at some given event--that is told by
the words and scenery? Whatever share words and gesture may contribute
is as nothing compared with that exultant and rapturous outburst of
melody. Wherever there is any character-drawing in Italian opera,
it is in the music, not in the words, as, for example, in the more
dramatic portions of Elvira's music in _Don Giovanni_. The frequent
movement in octaves imparts a nobility and dignity to her expression
which are altogether absent in the words.
The paraphrase of the words of the air from Gluck's _Orphée_ is
amusing enough as a _jeu d' esprit_, but surely cannot be taken
seriously. Hanslick seems to have misapprehended the music; it does
not express grief, and is not intended to. The _words_ express
the desolation of Orpheus at the loss of his beloved, but the
_Stimmung_ of the melody is one of calm resignation. It is the
serene self-restraint with which Gluck loves to imbue his classic
heroes and heroines, and which is equally appropriate to joy and
grief. Grillparzer, whose authority both as a dramatist and as a
sensitive lover of music is rightly esteemed very highly, has declared
that it would be possible to take any one of Mozart's _arias_,
and set words of quite different meaning to them. This may be true of
many of Mozart's _arias_, which were often composed more with
regard to the organ of a particular singer than to the text before
him, but is assuredly not true of his great dramatic scenes and
finales.
Whatever value such speculations may possess vanishes before the
unconscious instinct of the creating artist. It is well known that
German dramatists and poets have from the beginning felt keenly the
need of musical expression. If the need was less felt by English
dramatists of our great period the reason is that it required the
development of music in the hands of the great German masters before
its power could be fully known. Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Hoffmann,
Richter, and a host of others all sighed for the aid of music.[33]
Kleist declared music to be the root of all the other arts. Their
dream could not be realized until the right form of the drama which
could unite with music had been found. It was at last found by Wagner
after repeated trial and failure. He determined the form as that in
which the characters act out of their own inner impulses. The
historical drama shows men as torn hither and thither by external
political considerations. The action is impelled by wheels within
wheels of intrigue and complex psychological mechanism. For such
subjects the romance, with its almost unlimited powers of expatiation,
is the proper vehicle, but they are unfitted for music; they
necessitate wearisome explanations of complicated motives altogether
foreign to the direct emotional character of musical drama. The
musical character is the one who is entirely himself, and whose
motives are therefore clear from the first; such subjects are to be
found above all in the mythologies of imaginative and poetically
gifted peoples. That does not of course mean that other subjects are
excluded, for there is no domain of life which may not offer the same
conditions, provided only that the characters have a strong and
well-marked individuality. When once this principle was discovered the
musical drama became a reality. Wagner uses for this form of drama the
term _reinmenschlich_--purely human--an expression which was in
keeping with the humanitarian views prevalent at the time when he
wrote, but not free from objection and apt to be misunderstood in our
day.
[Footnote 33: Many utterances of German poets to this effect will be
found reproduced in Chamberlain's _Richard Wagner_.]
If the drama longed for the means of expressing its own inmost nature,
no less did music seek for a nearer approach to objectivity and to the
conditions of human existence. If it is true that music is the root of
all the arts, then it must also be the root of human life, and must
seek to reveal itself in life and in the drama which is the mirror of
life. The desire for human expression is already, as we have seen,
very clearly discernible in the symphonies and sonatas of Beethoven,
but it is since his time that the most remarkable development has
taken place. The programme music of Berlioz, Liszt, and other
composers has rightly been condemned by many critics, but the mistake
was in the manner of the composition rather than in the intention,
which was natural, indeed inevitable. Wagner's assertion that with
Beethoven "the last symphony has been written"--rationally understood,
of course, as meaning that nothing beyond is possible on instrumental
lines--is quite true. There was nothing left but for music to take
form in things of human interest. Only the composers, perhaps as much
from want of an adequate dramatic form as from want of skill, failed
to attain their end. While evidently striving to follow out
Beethoven's hint, _mehr Ausdruck der Empfindung als Malerei_,
their powers failed, and they produced more _Malerei_ than
_Empfindung_. The reader may consider by the light of these
remarks the passage in Liszt's _Faust_ symphony in the slow
movement, where Gretchen is represented as plucking a daisy,
repeating, "He loves me, he loves me not," etc. The composer has
depicted the scene with wonderful skill and exquisite poetic feeling,
but the essence of Goethe's scene, which lies entirely in its
unconscious innocence, is gone in this highly wrought artificial
presentation. It is the difference between nature and art, between the
naïve, pure-minded maiden and the actress painted and decorated for
the stage.
There are few persons, I believe, who on hearing an instrumental
composition do not feel a desire to form a mental picture of its
contents, so to speak, to objectivate it in their minds. Aestheticians
tell us that we are wrong, and we are apt to laugh at each other's
pictures, but we all do it. Beethoven, as we know from his friend
Schindler and his pupil Ries, often, if not always, had some object
before him when composing his instrumental works. The fact that the
same music suggests different interpretations to different minds will
not disturb us if we remember that music does not and never can
_depict_ or _describe_ its object: for that we have the arts
of poetry and painting. What music can give is the emotional mood
which it calls forth, and which may be common to many objects very
different in their external character. A "stormy" movement may be
referred to a storm of winds and waves, or to a storm of human
passions, and so might suggest a battle, a shipwreck, a revolution, a
violent emotion of love or hatred, or a play of Shakespeare. But the
aversion which we naturally feel to the labelling of sonatas and
symphonies with titles is in my opinion justifiable,[34] because here
we recognize an attempt to stereotype one particular interpretation,
instead of leaving the mind of each hearer free to form his own.
[Footnote 34: The latest and most atrocious outrage on good taste in
this respect is the labelling of Beethoven's great B flat sonata as
"_the Hammerklavier_." All musicians of finer feeling should
unite to kill this absurd name.]
A musical composition is a vessel into which many wines can be poured.
It cannot in itself express either any material object or any definite
feeling which involves such an object. No music can alone, without a
suggestion from elsewhere, express a person, a place, or love or fear
or a battle or "a calm sea and prosperous voyage," or any similar
thing. But it has a marvellous power of receiving suggestions which
are offered to it, by words or otherwise, of carrying them on and, by
means of its own forces of movement and proportion, intensifying their
expression to, a degree inconceivable without its aid. Mathematics
present an exact analogy to music, and are to science what music is to
art. Both are ideal forms which in one sense only attain complete
individuality when they are pure, but in another sense have no meaning
until they are applied to some object of nature. A mathematical
formula is only true so long as it remains an ideal in the mind; but
its existence has no other purpose than to state a law for material
phenomena, when it at once loses its essential qualities as a
mathematical formula, certainty and accuracy. In this way we may
understand simultaneously the supremacy of absolute music and the
truth for which Wagner contends, that music can never be anything but
expression.
Dr. Hanslick's dictum that music has no other means for its expression
than movement and symbolism cannot be admitted. It can express through
association. All the senses have in some degree the faculty of
recalling in the mind impressions with which they have once been
associated. Who has never had the memory of his home or of some place
familiar to his childhood recalled by the scent of a flower or a
plant? No sense possesses this power in anything like the same degree
as that of hearing, especially when the connection has been
established through a musical strain. It is on this principle that
Wagner mainly relies in his dramatic musical motives. In itself the
connection is in the first instance artificial. A musical strain of a
striking individual character is brought into connection with some
idea of the drama, it may be a person or a scene or an incident, in
short, anything which may serve as a dramatic motive, and
thenceforward whenever the musical strain is heard, the idea with
which it has been associated will be called up in the mind of the
hearer. All the resources of modern music are then at the disposal of
the composer for exhibiting his motive in the most varied lights,
intensifying, varying, contrasting, or combining with other motives,
as the dramatic situation requires.
It often happens that the musical strain is heard before its
association with an idea of the drama has been established, as, for
example, in the instrumental prelude. The idea then seems to hover in
the music as a vague _presentiment_ (_Ahnung_) of something
that is to come. A superb example of this occurs at the end of _Die
Walküre_. Wotan has laid his daughter to rest, and surrounded her
with a barrier of fire. "Let none cross this fire who dreads my
spear," he cries, and at once the threat is answered by a defiant
blast from the trombones uttering a strain which has not yet taken
definite form, but which we learn from the sequel is the theme proper
to Siegfried the hero, who is destined to bring to an end the power of
the god.
Or the motive may reappear after it has served its purpose on the
stage; it is then a _reminiscence_ of past events. No finer
example of this could be found than in the music of Isolde's
swan-song, the so-called _Liebestod_, which is built up out of
the motives of the life into a symphonic structure of almost
unparalleled force and truth.