XI
Professor Weissmann has well pointed out that in the romantic days the orchestra dominated music because it was made to represent the unseen supernatural forces against which mere humanity struggled in vain. And the orchestra appealed to many sides of human temperament. It was the appropriate instrument of an age of machinery, and mechanical invention rapidly increased its powers. It appealed to the megalomania of certain types of genius, as well as to the philosophical worshipper of the infinite. It appealed to the plain man by its discipline, by its presentation of a number of nameless individuals doing the same thing at the same moment, and in later days—now, perhaps, more than ever before—by the sight of this huge force controlled and directed by the apparent inspiration of the virtuoso conductor.
The great singers, the few who have reached the highest summits of fame, have always wielded an incomparable power over their hearers. But that very element of personality which gives the supreme singer his greatness distracts the listener on any level but the highest. Personality is a capricious thing, and in singing, more than in any other form of music, the listener’s judgment is liable to be distorted by temperamental considerations which have nothing to do with art. In the case of the instrumentalist they can be more easily set aside. Personality is what human nature values more than anything else in the artist. We see it at its plainest when a singer faces an unsophisticated public; when the public is less simple-minded and inexperienced, when the music put before it is less direct and immediate in its expression, the judgment of personality may be misleading, and may easily mislead artistic judgment. A vigorous personality may delude the public into accepting bad music as good; certain types of music, on the other hand, may falsify the judgment of personality. These statements represent merely the obvious extremes; what must be remembered is that this interaction may vary subtly from moment to moment even during the course of one piece of music.
The multiform appeal of orchestral music bewilders even those who deliberately listen to it in an analytical frame of mind. The difficulty is complicated by the luxuriant growth, during the last hundred years, of what is called “programme-music”—music that sets out to describe or illustrate some idea that can be expressed, and often better expressed, in a literary or pictorial form. To dissect out and trace the history of all the means of emotional stimulus in such modern orchestral music as has become generally popular—such names as Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Richard Strauss, Elgar and Scriabin will give a sufficient idea of the category—would require a whole volume of highly technical analysis. Fortunately there are many music-lovers who have heard enough music to grasp intuitively, if vaguely, certain principles, conventions and technical methods which they are unable to describe in words. They will recognize how “picturesqueness” is achieved by the exploitation of conventional idioms: how these idioms evoke associations not merely with things outside music, but far more widely with the recollection of music of past generations as familiar to them as it was to the composer who exploits it. They will recognize conventions of sound without sense—strings of notes that perhaps once had musical value but have now become mere formulæ, rushing winds and roaring waves “full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing.” They would have learned also, one hopes, to mistrust the composers who delude their audiences, perhaps delude themselves too, with a shimmering veil of indeterminate harmonies, and to mistrust no less those who with an aggressive air of sincerity and directness assume the solemn pose of mystery and chivalry.