When Chapelmaster Kreisler ended, all were silent; poetry, passionate,
weird, and grotesque, had poured from their friend's lips; a strange
nightmare pageant had swept by them, beautiful and ghastly, like a mad
Brocken medley of the triumph of Dionysos and the dance of Death.
They were all silent--all save one, and that one said: "This is all very
fine, but I was told we were to have music; a good, sensible sonata of
Haydn's--would have been much more the thing than all this." He was a
Philistine, no doubt, but he was right; a good, sensible sonata of
Haydn's--nay, the stiffest, driest, most wooden fugue ever written by
the most crabbed professor of counterpoint would have been far more
satisfactory for people who expected music. A most fantastic rhapsody
they had indeed heard, but it had been a spoken one, and the best
strings of the piano had remained hanging snapped and silent during the
performance.
Poor Chapelmaster Kreisler! He has long been forgotten by the world in
general, and even those few that still are acquainted with his weird
portrait, smile at it as at a relic of a far distant time, when life and
art and all other things looked strangely different from how they look
now. Yet the crazy musician of Hoffmann is but the elder brother of all
our modern composers. With the great masters of the last century, Haydn,
Mozart, Cimarosa, who were scarcely in their graves when he improvised
his great word fantasia, he has no longer any connection with our own
musicians, born half a century after his end, he is closely linked, for,
like him, they are romanticists. They do not indeed wear C sharp minor
coloured coats, nor do they improvise in the dark on pianos with broken
strings; they are perfectly sane and conscious of all their doings; yet,
all the same, they are but Kreisler's younger brothers. Like the poor
chapelmaster of Hoffmann, music itself has a fantastic madness in it;
like him, it has been crazed by disappointment, by jealousy, by impotent
rage at finding that it cannot now do what it once did, and cannot yet
do what will never be done; like Kreisler it deals no longer with mere
sequences of melody and harmony, but with thoughts, feelings, and
images, hopes and fears and despair, with wild chaotic visions of
splendour and of ghastliness. But the position of our music differs from
that of Kreisler in this much, that no friendly pair of snuffers crashes
on to the strings and makes them fly asunder; that, while Kreisler
spoke, our music can only play its fancies and whimsies; and that,
instead of hearing intelligible spoken words, we hear only musical
sounds which are gibberish and chaos.
For the time when men sought in music only for music's own loveliness
is gone by; and the time has come when all the arts trespass on each
other's ground, and, worst of all, when the arts which can give and show
envy poetry, the art which can neither give nor show but only suggest,
and when, for the sake of such suggestion, they would cheat us of all
the real gifts--gifts of noble forms of line and colour, and sweet woofs
of melody and harmony which they once gave us. The composer now wishes
to make you see and feel all that he sees and feels in his imagination,
the woods and seas, the joys and sorrows, all the confused day-dreams,
sweet and drowsy, all the nightmare orgies which may pass through his
brain; the sound has become the mere vehicle for this, the weak, vague
language which he can only stammer and we can only divine; the artist
breaks violently against the restraint of form, thinking to attain the
unattainable beyond its limits, and sinks down baffled and impotent
amidst ruin.
We are apt to think of music as of a sort of speech until, on
examination, we find it has no defined meaning either for the speaker or
for the listener. In reality, music and speech are as different and as
separate as architecture and painting, as wholly opposed to each other
as only those two things can be which, having started from the same
point, have travelled in completely opposite directions, like the two
great rivers which, originating on the same alp, flow respectively to
the north, and to the south, each acquiring a separate character on its
way--the one as the blue river of Germany, ending amidst the tide-torn
sandbanks of the North Sea; the other as the green river of Provence,
dying amidst the stagnant pools and fever-haunted marshes of the
Mediterranean. As long as the Rhine and the Rhone are not yet Rhine and
Rhone, but merely pools of snow-water among the glaciers, so long are
they indistinguishable; but as soon as separated into distinct streams,
their dissimilarity grows with every mile of their diverging course.
So as to speech and music: as long as both exist only in embryo in the
confused cries and rude imitations of the child or of the primitive
people, they cannot be distinguished; but as soon as they can be called
either speech or music, they become unlike and increase in dissimilarity
in proportion as they develop. The cry and the imitative sound become,
on the one hand, a word which, however rude, begins to have an arbitrary
meaning, and, on the other hand, a song which, however uncouth, has no
positive meaning; the word, as it develops, acquires a more precise and
abstract signification, becomes more and more of a symbol; the song, as
it develops, loses definite meaning, becomes more and more a complete
unsymbolical form, until at length the word, having become a thing for
use, a mere means of communication, ceases to require vocal utterance,
and turns into a written sign; while the song, having become an object
of mere pleasure, requires more and more musical development, and is
transported from the lips of man to the strings of an instrument. But
while speech and music are thus diverging, while the one is becoming
more and more of an arbitrary symbol conveying an abstract idea, and the
other is growing more and more into an artistic form conveying no idea,
but pleasing the mind merely by its concrete form--while this divergence
is taking place, a corresponding movement accompanies it which removes
both speech and music farther and farther from their common origin: the
cry of passion and the imitative sound. The Rhone and the Rhine are
becoming not only less like each other, but as the one becomes green and
the other blue, so also are both losing all trace of the original dull
white of the snow water. In the word, the cry and the imitation are
being effaced by arbitrary, symbolical use, by that phonetic change
which shows how little a word as it exists for us retains of its
original character; in the song they are being subdued by constant
attempts at obtaining a more distinct and symmetrical shape, by the
development of the single sounds and their arrangement with a view to
pleasing the ear and mind. Yet both retain the power of resuming to a
limited extent their original nature; but in proportion as the word or
the song resumes the characteristics of the cry or of the imitation does
each lose its own slowly elaborated value, the word as a suggester of
thought, the song as a presenter of form. Now, in so far as the word is
a word, or the song a song, its effect on the emotions is comparatively
small: the word can awaken emotion only as a symbol, that is, indirectly
and merely suggestively; the song can awaken emotion only inasmuch as
it yet partakes of the nature of the brute cry or rude imitation. Thus,
while language owes its emotional effects to the ideas arbitrarily
connected with it, music owes its power over the heart to its sensuous
elements as given by nature. But music exists as an art, that is to say,
as an elaboration of the human mind, only inasmuch as those sensuous
brute elements are held in check and measure, are made the slaves of an
intellectual conception. The very first step in the formation of the art
is the subjection of the emotional cry or the spontaneous imitation to
a process of acoustic mensuration, by which the irregular sound becomes
the regular, definite _note_; the second step is the subjection of this
already artificial sound to mensuration of time, by which it is made
rhythmical; the third step is the subjection of this rhythmical sound to
a comparative mensuration with other sounds, by which we obtain harmony;
the last step is adjustment of this artificially obtained note and
rhythm and harmony into that symmetrical and intellectually appreciable
form which constitutes the work of art, for art begins only where the
physical elements are subjected to an intellectual process, and it
exists completely only where they abdicate their independence and become
subservient to an intellectual design.
Music is made up of two elements: the intellectual and the sensuous on
the one hand, of that which is conceived by the mind and perceived by
the mind (for our ears perceive only the separate constituent sounds of
a tune, but not the tune itself); on the other hand, of that which is
produced by the merely physical and appreciated by the merely physical,
by the nerves of hearing, through which it may, but only indirectly,
affect the mind. Now if, from an artistic point of view, we must protest
against any degradation of the merely sensuous part, it is because such
a degradation would involve a corresponding one in the intellectual
part, because the physical basis must be intact and solid before we can
build on it an intellectual structure, because the physical element
through which mentality is perceived must be perfect in order that the
mental manifestation be equally so; but the physical must always remain
a mere basis, a mere vehicle for the mental. The enjoyment obtainable
from the purely physical part may indeed be very great and very
valuable, but it is a mere physical enjoyment; and the pleasure we
derive from a fine voice, as distinguished from a fine piece or a fine
interpretation, is as wholly unartistic as that which we receive from a
ripe peach or a cool breeze: it is a purely sensuous pleasure, given us
ready-made by nature, to give or to perceive which requires no
mentality, in which there is no human intention, and consequently no
art. Now, the effect of the cry or of the imitation, and that of certain
other manifestations of sound, such as tone, pitch, volume, rhythm,
major or minor intervals, which are cognate with, but independent of,
the cry or the imitation--the effect of all this is an entirely sensuous
one, an effect of unintelligent matter on the nerves, not of calculating
intelligence on the mind, and it is to these physical effects, and not
to the mentally elaborated form, that music owes its peculiar power of
awaking or even of suggesting emotion.
That this is the case is shown by various circumstances. The ancients,
who, as is now proved beyond dispute, possessed very little of the
intellectual part of music, little of what we should deem its form,
enjoyed its emotional effects to a far higher degree than could we in
our present musical condition; the stories of Timotheus, Terpander, and
other similar ones, being at least founded on fact, as is evident from
the continual allusions of Greek writers to the moral or immoral effect
of the art, and their violent denunciations of people whose only social
crime was to have added a string to a lyre or a hole to a flute. We
ourselves have constant opportunities of remarking the intense emotional
effects due to mere pitch, tone, and rhythm; that is to say, to the
merely physical qualities of number, nature, and repetition of musical
vibrations. We have all been cheered by the trumpet and depressed by the
hautboy; we have felt a wistful melancholy steal over us while listening
to the drone of the bagpipe and the quaver of the flute of the pifferari
at the shrine; we have felt our heart beat and our breath halt on
catching the first notes of an organ as we lifted the entrance curtain
of some great cathedral; we have known nothing more utterly harrowing
than a hurdy-gurdy playing a cheerful tune, or a common accordion
singing out a waltz or a polka. Nay, it is worthy of remark that the
instruments capable of the greatest artistic development are just those
which possess least this power over the nerves: the whole violin and
harpsichord tribe, the human voice when sound and natural--saying least
themselves, are capable of saying most for others; whereas the trumpet,
the accordion, the harp, the zither, are condemned by their very
expressiveness to a hopeless inferiority; they produce an effect
spontaneously by their mere tone; the artist can produce on them but
that effect, and can scarcely heighten even it. A musical critic of the
beginning of this century, Giuseppe Carpani, wishing to defend Rossini
from the accusation of being unemotional, boldly laid down the principle
that it never is the composer who makes people cry, but the author of
the words and the singer. As to the composer, he can only please, but
not move.
Never (he says) were people more moved than by a certain scene in
Metastasio's _Araserse_, set by Mortellari, and sung by the famous
Pacchierotti (about 1780); and do you think perhaps that it was
Mortellari, who made them cry? Mortellari, the stupidest mediocrity,
_Dio l'abbia in gloria!_ No, it was Metastasio and Pacchierotti, the
verse and the voice.
This was a mere absurd exaggeration, and a mere captious plea for
Rossini, who, had he only had Metastasio to write the words and
Pacchierotti to sing, would doubtless have moved the whole universe to
tears, with "Di tanti palpiti." Yet in this exaggeration, an important
truth has been struck out. This truth is that the writer of the
libretto, having at his disposal the clear, idea-suggesting word, can
bring up a pathetic situation before the mind; that the singer, having
at his command the physical apparatus for producing an effect on the
nerves, can sensuously awaken emotion; while the composer, possessing
neither the arbitrary idea-suggesting word, nor the nerve-moving sound,
but only the artistic form, can please to the utmost, but move only to a
limited degree.
Thus, there is a once popular but now deservedly forgotten air in
the _Romeo e Giulietta_ of Zingarelli, which some seventy years ago
possessed the most miraculous power over what people called the heart,
and especially over the not too sensitive one of Napoleon, who, whenever
it was sung by his favourite Crescentini, invariably burst into tears.
The extraordinary part of the matter is that this air happens to be
peculiarly insipid, without any very definite expression, but, on the
whole, of a sort of feeble cheerfulness, and certainly is the last piece
that we should judge capable of such deeply emotional effects. But the
situation of Romeo is an intensely pathetic one, and it is probable
that the singer's voice may have possessed some strange power over the
nerves, something of the purely sensuous pathos of an accordion or a
zither, especially in the long, gradually diminished notes, "fine by
degrees and beautifully less," which move like an AEolian harp. But, if
the pathetic effect of "Ombra adorata" could not be ascribed to the
composition neither could it be ascribed to the interpretation. For
this sensuous pathos, though enhanced by the singer's intellectual
qualities, in no way depends upon them; the intellect can make him
graduate and improve the form of a piece, all that which is perceived by
the mind, but it has no influence on the nerves; Crescentini's musical
intelligence may have enabled him to make "Ombra adorata" a beautiful
song, but only his physical powers of voice could have enabled him to
make it a pathetic one.
As these physical elements are the material out of which artistic forms
are moulded by the musician, he necessarily deals with and disposes of
those powers over the nerves which are inherent in them. When he creates
a musical form out of minor intervals, he necessarily gives that form
something of the melancholy effect of such intervals; when he composes
a piece with the peculiar rhythm of a march, he necessarily gives his
piece some of the inspiriting power of that rhythm; when he employs
a hautboy or a trumpet, he necessarily lends his work some of the
depressing quality of the hautboy or some of the cheering quality of
the trumpet. Thus the intellectually conceived and perceived forms are
invested with the power over the nerves peculiar to certain of the
physical elements of music; but it is in those component physical
elements, and not in the forms into which they are disposed, that lies
the emotional force of the art. Nor is this all: the physical elements,
inasmuch as they are subdued and regulated and neutralized by one
another in the intellectual form, are inevitably deprived of the full
vigour of their emotional power; the artistic form has tamed and curbed
them, has forbidden their freely influencing the nerves, while at the
same time it--the form--has exerted its full sway over the mind. The
mountains have been hewn into terraces, the forests have been clipped
into gardens, the waves have been constrained into fountains, the
thunder has been tuned down into musical notes; nature has submitted to
man, and has abdicated her power into his hands. The stormy reign of
instinctive feeling has come to an end; the serene reign of art has
begun.
In order to see these sensuous elements of music in their unmixed
purity, in their unbridled strength, we must descend to the lowest
stages of the art, compared with whose emotional effects those of modern
music are as nothing, and least of all in the classic periods of the
art; but even in modern music, what really strong emotional effects
there may be are due to a momentary suspension of artistic activity, to
a momentary return to the formless, physically touching music of early
ages. The most emotional thing ever written by Mozart is the exclamation
of Donna Elvira, when, after leaving Don Giovanni at his ill-omened
supper, she is met on the staircase by the statue of the commander; this
exclamation is but one high, detached note, formless, meaningless, which
pierces the nerves like a blade; submit even this one note to artistic
action, bid the singer gradually swell and diminish it, and you at once
rob it of its terrible power. This is Mozart's most emotional stroke;
but was a Mozart, nay, was any musician, necessary for its conception?
Would not that cry have been the same if surrounded by true music? A
contrary example, but to the same effect, is afforded by Gluck in his
great scene of Orpheus at the gate of Hades, which may have moved our
great-grandfathers, accustomed to fugues and minuets and _rigaudons_,
but which seems coldly beautiful as some white antique group to us,
accustomed as we are to romantic art. The _No!_ of the Furies loses
all its effects by being worked into a definite musical form, by being
locked into the phrase begun by Orpheus; it is merely a constituent note
and no more, until after some time it is repeated detached, and without
any reference to the main melody sung by Orpheus: at first it is part of
a work of art, later it becomes a mere brute shout, and then, and then
only, does it obtain a really moving character.
When these potent physical elements are held in subjection by artistic
form, emotion may be suggested, more or less vaguely, but only
suggested: we perceive them in the fabric which imprisons them, and we
perceive their power, but it is as we should perceive the power of a
tiger chained up behind a grating: we remember and imagine what it has
been and might be, but we no longer feel it; for us to again feel it,
the artistic form must be torn down; the physical elements unchained,
and then, and then only, shall we tremble once more before them. Mozart
may be on his door-step as a regiment passes: he may feel the inspiring,
courage-awakening effect of its rough rhythm and discordant, screeching
trumpets: he may go upstairs, sit down to his piano, make use of all
those sensuous elements, of the rhythm and of the wind instruments,
which have stirred him in that regimental music: he may use them in a
piece professedly suggested by that music; the piece will be "Non piu
andrai," and a masterpiece. We shall be reminded of military music by
it, and we shall be aware of the fact that its rhythm and accompaniment
are martial; we shall even call it a martial piece; but will it stir us,
will it make us step out and feel soldier-like as would the coarsest
regimental trumpets? Jommelli may enter a cathedral as the bells are
tolling to mass, and all seems undulating and heaving beneath their
swing; he may feel the awful effect of those simple, shapeless sounds:
he may listen to their suggestion and frame the opening of his Mass for
the Dead on that deep monotonous sway; he will produce a masterpiece,
the wondrous _Introitus_ of his Requiem, in which we shall indeed
recognize something of the solemn rhythm of the bells, something that
will awaken in us the recollection of that moment when the cathedral
towers seemed to rock to their movement, and the aisles re-echoed their
roar, and when even miles away in the open country the clear deep toll
floated across the silent fields; but that effect itself we shall never
hear in the music. The artist has used the already existing emotional
elements for his own purposes, but those purposes are artistic ones;
they aim at delighting the mind, not at tickling the nerves.
The composer, therefore, inasmuch as he deprives the emotional elements
of music of their freedom and force of action, cannot possibly produce
an effect on the emotions at all to be compared with that spontaneously
afforded by nature; he can imitate the rush of waters or the sob of
despair only so distantly and feebly that the effect of either is
well-nigh lost, and even for such an imitation he must endanger the
artistic value of his work, which is safe only when it is the artist's
sole aim and object. The most that the composer can legitimately do is
to suggest a given emotion by employing in his intellectual structure
such among the physical elements of his art as would in a state of
complete freedom awaken that given emotion; he may choose such sensuous
elements as would inspire melancholy, or joy, or serenity; he may reject
any contrary element or any incongruous effect, and he may thus produce
what we shall call a pathetic piece, or a cheerful piece, or a solemn
piece.
But this pathetic, cheerful, or solemn character depends not upon the
intellectual forms imagined by the composer, but upon the sensuous
elements afforded by nature; and the artistic activity of the composer
consists in the conception of those forms, not in the selection of those
physical elements. When, therefore, a composer is said to express the
words which he is setting, he does so by means not of the creation
of artistic forms, but by the selection of sensuous materials; the
suggestion of an emotion analogous to that conveyed by the words is due
not to the piece itself, but to its physical constituents; wherefore the
artistic value of the composition in no way depends upon its adaptation
to the words with which it is linked. There is no more common mistake,
nor one which more degrades artistic criticism, than the supposition
that the merit of "He was despised and rejected of men," or of "Fin
ch'an del vino," depends upon their respective suitableness to the
words: the most inferior musician would perceive that such and such
physical elements were required to suggest a mental condition in harmony
with either of these verbal expressions of feeling; the most inferior
musician could have given us a piece as melancholy as "He was despised,"
or as cheerful as "Fin ch'an del vino," but--and here lies the unique
test of artistic worth--only Handel could have given us so beautiful a
melancholy piece as the one, and only Mozart so beautiful a cheerful
piece as the other. As it is with the praise, so likewise is it with the
blame: a composer who sets a cheerful piece to dismal words, or a dismal
piece to cheerful words, may be reprehensible for not reflecting that
the mind thus receives together two contrary impressions, and he may be
condemned for want of logic and good sense; but not a word can be said
against his artistic merit, any more than we could say a word against
the artistic merit of the great iron-worker of the Renaissance, who
closed the holy place where lies the Virgin's sacred girdle with a
screen of passion flowers, in whose petals hide goats and ducks, on
whose tendrils are balanced pecking cranes, and in the curling leaves of
which little naked winged Cupids are drawing their bows and sharpening
their arrows even as in the bas-reliefs of a pagan sarcophagus. In the
free and spontaneous activity of musical conception, the composer may
forget the words he is setting, as the painter may forget the subject
he is painting in the fervour of plastic imagination; for the musician
conceives not emotions, but modulations; and the painter conceives not
actions, but gestures and attitudes. Thence it comes that Mozart has
made regicide Romans storm and weep as he would have made Zerlina and
Cherubino laugh, just as Titian made Magdalen smite her breast in
the wilderness with the smile of Flora on her feast-day; hence that
confusion in all save form, that indifference to all save beauty, which
characterises all the great epochs of art, that sublime jumble of times
and peoples, of tragic and comic, that motley crowding together of
satyrs and anchorites, of Saracens and ancient Romans, of antique
warriors and mediaeval burghers, of Gothic tracery and Grecian arabesque,
of Theseus and Titania, of Puck and Bottom, that great masquerade of art
which we, poor critics, would fain reduce to law and rule, to
chronological and ethnological propriety.
Those times are gone by: we wish to make every form correspond with an
idea; we wish to be told a story by the statue, by the picture, most of
all by that which can least tell it--by music. We forget that music is
neither a symbol which can convey an abstract thought, nor a brute cry
which can express an instinctive feeling; we wish to barter the power
of leaving in the mind an indelible image of beauty for the miserable
privilege of awakening the momentary recollection of one of nature's
sounds, or the yet more miserable one of sending a momentary tremor
through the body; we would rather compare than enjoy, and rather weep
than admire. Therefore we try to force music to talk a language which
it does not speak and which we do not understand; and succeed only in
making it babble like a child or rave like a madman, obtaining nothing
but unintelligible and incoherent forms in our anxiety to obtain
intelligible and logical thoughts. We forget that great fact, forever
overlooked by romanticism, that poetry and music are essentially
distinct in their nature; that Chapelmaster Kreisler's improvisation was
not played but spoken; and that had not the snuffers fallen into the
piano, had not the strings snapped asunder, Hoffmann would have had to
record, not a grandly grotesque series of images, but a succession of
formless and meaningless chords.