Shakespeare's magic is in the phrasing,—not, be it remembered, a merely extraneous, artificial grace added to the idea, a mere clothing that can be put on or off it at will, but a subtle interaction and mutual enkindlement of idea and expression. For the musician that enkindlement comes from the adding of music to the words: the music does for the idea what the style does for it in the case of the poet,—raises it to a higher emotional power, gives it colour, odour, incandescence, wings. Brynhilde comes to tell Siegfried that he must die. The mere announcement of the fact is next to nothing; the infinities and the solemn silences only gather about it when the orchestra gives out the wonderful theme.
The pure poet, working in his own material alone, would give us this sense of illimitable sadness by the infusion into the mere idea of some remote, unanalysable wizardry of words and rhythms, as in Clough's
"Ah, that I were far away from the crowd and the streets of the city,
Under the vine-trellis laid, O my beloved, with thee!"
or Arnold's
Wagner was blind to this super-intellectual quality in words because for him that quality was most naturally added to them by music. Speech was with him always "the organ of the intellect"; our modern speech was "utterly feelingless": the poet cannot communicate feeling because "articulate language" is capable only of "description and indication."[360] He himself was strictly speaking hardly a poet at all: he was simply a writer of words for music,—words to which the music had to add the emotional beauty that the genuine poet would have conveyed by speech alone. We are therefore not in the least surprised to learn that Wagner first of all wrote his "poems" in prose, which he then turned into rhyme or rhythm at his leisure. We possess, in Wieland the Smith,[361] an intended operatic libretto of his that never got past the prose stage. Having decided not to set it to music himself, he offered it to Liszt. "The poem," he writes to the Princess Wittgenstein, "is fully worked out; nothing remains to be done [sic] but the simple versification, which any tolerably skilful verse-maker could do. Liszt will easily find one. In the most important places I have written the verses myself."[362]
Hence all this elaborate analysis of vowels and consonant sounds is quite beside the mark. He imagines "the feeling" of a word to reside in the "root-syllable" of it,—"which was invented or discovered by the primitive emotional need of humanity" (die aus der Nothwendigkeit des ursprünglichsten Empfindungszwanges des Menschen erfunden oder gefunden ward). And the fountain of that emotional force in the root is the vowel sound, which is "the inner feeling incarnate" (das verkörperte innere Gefühl).[363] Portentous attributes are also given to the consonants, and the initial consonant is pronounced to be of more significance than the terminal. Most of this is merely fantastic. Words, especially in the hands of a poet, are not simply clothed vowel sounds; they are entities with a marvellous life of their own. The appeal of Keats's
has nothing whatever to do with vowels and consonants: we no more think of these than we think of vibration numbers when we listen to a succession of musical harmonies. The beauty of the lines is in the totality and the rareness of the imaginative picture they flash upon our vision; and to attempt to explain the secret of this in terms of vowels and consonants is as futile as to try to explain a flower by its physical particles.
XII
One is sometimes amazed, in reading Opera and Drama, at the persistence with which Wagner pursues the obvious, hunting it down, as Oscar Wilde said of James Payn, with the enthusiasm of a short-sighted detective. He is almost as elaborately absurd over his vowels and consonants as M. Jourdain. The explanation is to be sought partly in the tendency to long-windedness, the passion for pursuing every idea to the death, that was always characteristic of him,—it derived ultimately from the inexorably logical nature of his mind,—and partly from the fact that he had a very stupid public and a very stupid set of artists to educate. Opera and Drama has been made both more lucid and somewhat obvious for us to-day by Wagner's own operas. If there is less need to-day to labour certain points as he does, it is because they are now such universally accepted truths that it is hard for us to imagine a time when people needed to have them driven into them at the point of a pen. Here and there his letters give us an inkling of the difficulties with which he had to contend. Few people in the middle of the nineteenth century, apparently, had any idea of real drama in opera.[364] Even the singers,—with the exception of a born genius here and there like Schröder-Devrient,—had little notion that their parts consisted of anything but so many words to be sung as brilliantly as possible. In one of his letters to Liszt, Wagner describes his horror at seeing, in the Dresden opera house, the Tannhäuser, in the "Hall of Song" scene, shouting his declaration of unholy love for Venus straight into the face of the chaste Elisabeth!—and this in spite of the composer having taken particular care to have all directions copied in full in the separate vocal parts. "What result was possible but that the public should be confused and not know in the least what to make of it? Indeed, I discovered in Dresden that the public became acquainted with the dramatic contents of the opera only by reading the text-book; that is, they only came to understand the performance by abstracting their minds from the actual performance and filling-in from their own imagination."[365] And as he hints, if these things could be done in a first-class opera house like Dresden, what hair-raising horrors must go on in the smaller theatres?
A good deal of Opera and Drama, then, took its rise in the immediate circumstances of the German operatic life of the early nineteenth century, and has no particular validity for the world in general to-day.[366] Other portions of it relate only or mainly to the Ring. For all his insistence on the necessity of alliterative verse (Stabreim), he virtually discarded it when he had finished with the Ring. The Meistersingers is written throughout in rhymed verse. In Tristan he employs in turn alliteration, rhyme, and unrhymed verse; Parsifal fluctuates between a sort of vers libre that is often as near as possible to prose, and a rhymed stanza-form for the more pronouncedly lyric portions. Opera and Drama, in fact, was in large part the reduction to theory of the principles of structures that were slowly taking shape within him as he pondered on the Siegfried legend. As with all great artistic creators, each subject was seen so vividly, took such complete possession of him, that it unconsciously made for itself its own inevitable form. He himself knew that it was in the Ring that the theories of Opera and Drama had their origin. "Even now," he writes to Uhlig, "must I learn that I should not have discovered the most important conditions for the conformation of the drama of the future had I not, as artist, lighted quite unconsciously upon them in my Siegfried."[367] And working backwards, as it were, from the completed work as we have it now, it is easy enough to see how the subject led him of itself to a new theory of opera. He had a gigantic saga to condense into the dimensions of a normal stage action; the most drastic economy of words was therefore necessary. As the burden of the emotional expression was to be undertaken by the music, the purely verbal portion would have to be reduced to the barest essentials consistent with making the conduct of the drama and the motives of the characters clear. And as every word had to be vital to the drama, and the musical phrase was to fit the verbal phrase as if the two had been predestined for each other from the beginning of time, each line, short as it might be, had to be packed with accents as salient as those of the music itself. This condition seemed to be most perfectly fulfilled in Stabreim, because there the vowel or consonant that gave definition to the word was thrown into the highest possible relief at the very moment of the incidence of the musical accent. The following quotations from the Valkyrie will make this clear:
A
Die Betrog'ne lass auch zertreten.
Let them trample on the betrayed one.
B
Dass mit Zwang ich halte, was dir nicht haftet.
That by force I hold what denies thee homage.
C
Wer bist du, sag', die so schön und ernst mir erscheint?
Who art thou, say, who dost stand so beauteous and stern?
It was therefore, as usual, the musician in him controlling the poet, although he always strenuously denied this, and indeed his complaint against the old-time opera was that the poet was held in servitude to the musician. In each case the poet was the serf, but the terms of slavery were different. In the older opera he had to work within the limits of a set scheme that gave him little or no scope for character-drawing or for the natural evolution of a great dramatic action. In the Wagnerian opera the poet was indeed allowed to make his portion of the work worthy and consistent, but he was permitted no further scope than was consistent with the necessities of the music. If it be true that Wagner restored the poet to liberty by making the drama the end and the music the means, it was only in the sense that he first of all made the drama of the dimensions and the pattern that music required. Beyond these dimensions, away from that pattern, it could not be allowed to go.
That the musician in Wagner ruled the poet is plain enough to us now, but it was always denied by Wagner himself. In the Communication to my Friends, that elucidates so gratefully for us so many dark passages in Opera and Drama, he is persistently blind to the fact that is obvious enough to everyone else. As far as Rienzi, he tells us, he had taken his operatic subjects from ready-made stories, while with the Flying Dutchman he struck out a new path, framing his own libretto out of the simple unpolished outlines of a folk-saga. "Henceforward," he goes on to say, "with regard to all my dramatic works I was in the first instance Poet, and only in the complete working out of the poem did I become once more Musician. Only," he rather naïvely continues, "I was a poet who was conscious in advance of the power of musical expression for the working out of his poems."[368] Quite so: when a subject took possession of him he would see it all in terms of musical expression and development; and unconsciously the poem would be so planned as to provide the needful framework, and no more, for the musical emotion. Later on, after arguing that music is the emotional expression per se, but that it can only ally itself with words that contain the possibility of emotion, he once more lets us see that it was the musician in him that determined his choice of subject and the manner of its treatment. "What I perceived, I now looked at solely with the eyes of music [nur aus dem Geiste der Musik]; though not," he rightly points out, "that music whose formal rules might still have embarrassed my expression, but the music that was complete within me, and in which I could express myself as in a mother tongue."[369] Granting that the musical world from the centre of which he wished to pour himself out upon poetry was not that of the stereotyped operatic composer, the fact remains that it was from the centre of music itself that the outpouring was to come. And we may further grant that "it was precisely by the facility of musical expression" he had acquired that "he became a poet." What had happened in the interval between Rienzi and the Flying Dutchman, and still more in the interval between the Flying Dutchman and the Ring, was that his musical sense had so enormously expanded that it was now capable of weaving a continuous emotional tissue of its own,—a tissue, however, that required the framework of poetry to make it definite. He was right; it was of the musician in him that the poet was born. And it was the musician insisting on the dramatic "stuff" being reduced to its pure essentials that led him to reject the wide-spreading romance and history, and to seize upon the myth, in which a human content was presented in the simplest possible form.
XIII
The musician, then, being at the basis of all his æsthetics, all his theories of opera and drama, the question arises, what sort of a musician was he? He was the spiritual son of Beethoven; a remoter ancestor was Bach. This is the cardinal fact in the psychology of Wagner; and it will need to be examined in all its bearings.
Wagner was one of those dynamically charged personalities after whose passing the world can never be the same as it was before he came—one of the tiny group of men to whom it is given to bestride an old world and a new, but to sunder them by a gulf that becomes ever more and more impassable; one of the very few who are able so to fill the veins of a whole civilisation with a new principle of vitality that the tingle of it is felt not only by the rarer but by the commonest spirits—some new principle from which, whether a man likes it or not, he will find it impossible to escape. Wagner is probably the only figure in the whole history of music of whom this can be said. Bach created no such upheaval. He counts for next to nothing in the music of his own day and that of the two generations that followed him. He did not make a new world in music: rather had a new world to be made before men's eyes were competent to take the measure of that towering stature, or men's hearts quick enough with life to respond to the profound humanism of that great soul. We were not fit for Bach until Beethoven and Wagner—and Wagner, perhaps, even more than Beethoven—made us so. Beethoven, again, had it not been for Wagner, would probably not have meant as much to us as he does now, or become the fertilising force he is in modern music; and even that fertilisation is effected through Wagner's work rather than along lines in continuation of Beethoven's own. If anyone doubts this, let him ask himself what new spirit of enduring vitality and power of propagation has come out of the classical symphony pure and simple. Not Brahms, assuredly, great as he is: "arrested development" is written large upon the forms and the ideas of all the music that has come out of Brahms's symphonies as clearly as upon those symphonies themselves. So far as modern instrumental music has developed in humanity of utterance or in breadth of structure, it is from assimilating from Beethoven, through Wagner, just the urgent poetic spirit that Brahms passed by in Beethoven,—the spirit of which Beethoven was himself only dimly conscious, but which Wagner from the beginning saw to be inherent in him, and which he distilled from the general tissue of Beethoven's work and used in a new form for magical results of his own. The only explosive force in music at all comparable in general to Wagner was Monteverdi. But Monteverdi came a couple of hundred years too soon. The world was not ready for him—it is hardly a paradox to say that he was not ready for himself—and his explosion mostly spent itself in a desert. Wagner had first-rate luck in this as in everything else in his life that really mattered to him as an artist; not only had he the right dynamic spark within him, but he was born into an atmosphere made electrically ready by the passionate soul's cry of Beethoven. The explosion came—a cataclysmic upheaval, leading to a new geological formation, as it were, in music, new geographical delimitations, a new fauna and flora.
He had access to Beethoven's heart: and from the blood in Beethoven's veins he won the strength both for his own new expression and his new freedom of form. It is one of the things we should be constantly thanking Providence for that the natural man in him insisted on making its own world in its own way. Busoni, in his suggestive Entwurf einer neuen Aesthetik der Tonkunst, has remarked upon the curious formalism of most music, even the greatest. Here is an art fortunate enough to be free from all material factors: it is, as Busoni says, simply "sounding air," and is therefore presumably capable of a freedom of handling that should be the despair of workers in the other arts. Perfect freedom has yet to come; looked at from the heights, even giants like Bach and Beethoven and Mozart are seen to be loaded with chains of their own and their fellows' forging, and to be performing the same timid evolutions again and again in one small corner of a field, while glorious leagues of unexplored country unroll themselves all around them. Bach and Beethoven enriched music by a sort of intensive culture of an inherited estate. Wagner was really the first to leap the fences and break down the gates and send his ploughshare deep into the bowels of a new earth. Almost from his earliest years he had an instinctive sense of the great force of emotional liberation that was struggling for an outlet in Beethoven's music. He was probably the only man in Europe to be aware of it and its tremendous significance for the future. There were plenty of men who felt the greatness of Beethoven; but not one of them, apparently, saw him as Wagner did. It is evident that people like Mendelssohn and Robert and Clara Schumann, for example, with whom he talked much in the 'forties, had no inkling that out of the spume of this eager, restless mind the future of music was to be born. To them his far-darting talk about Beethoven was apparently no more than the interesting speculations of a clever but slightly eccentric visionary. From the first he fastened upon the seminal essence of Beethoven's later work—the attempt of a great soul, hampered somewhat by a transmitted form, to pour out an endless fund of quasi-dramatic emotion in music. The problem that lay before Wagner was how to release this fund of emotion, to give it wings that would carry it over the whole field of human life, to give it a new and more wonderful articulation. After years of struggling he found his way to the light. It was one of the extremely lucky "throws" of nature—a throw she will probably not achieve again for generations—that within the musician who had this unique vision of a music infinitely human and perfectly free there was a dramatist capable of providing the definite framework upon which the indefinite musical emotion could be woven into firm, coherent shapes. His theory that purely instrumental music had shot its last bolt with Beethoven, and that the choral ending to the Ninth Symphony is the unconscious, instinctive cry of the musician for the redemption of music by poetry, is the soundest of æsthetics if we do not take it too literally. Music did need this fertilisation by poetry if it was to win a new procreative power. Agreeable music has been made, and will continue to be made, by the passionless, disinterested weaving for its own sake of beautiful strands of tone. But great music must go deeper than this, and the deeper it goes the closer it comes to the heart; and our name for the necessities of the heart is poetry.
XIV
Having thus summarised the attitude of Wagner to Beethoven and to poetic music in general, let us proceed to fill in the details of the theory, allowing Wagner, wherever possible, to speak for himself.
He has set forth his views upon Beethoven with the greatest positiveness in his letters to Uhlig, and much more lucidly there than in Opera and Drama.[370] He saw in Beethoven's music the struggle to express a definite poetic idea in an abstract form that necessarily made the communication of the nature of the idea itself impossible. He always protested against the current fashion of performing Beethoven's symphonies as if they were nothing more than agreeable or exciting musical patterns. They were tone poems, and could mean nothing to the hearer unless the poetry at the core of them was made clear. "The essence of the great works of Beethoven," he writes to Uhlig, "is that they are only in the last place Music, but contain in the first place a poetic subject. Or shall we be told that this subject is only taken from music itself? Would not this be like saying that the poet takes his subject from speech, and the painter his from colour? The musical conductor who sees in one of Beethoven's tone-works nothing but the music, is exactly like a reciter who should hold only by the language of a poem, or the explainer of a picture who could not get beyond its colour. This, however, is the case with our conductors, even in the best instances—for many do not even so much as understand the music; they understand the key, the themes, the working of the parts, the instrumentation, and so on, and think that with these they understand the whole of the content of the tone-work."[371] And again: "The characteristic of the great compositions of Beethoven is that they are veritable poems, in which it is sought to bring a real subject to representation. The obstacle to their comprehension lies in the difficulty of finding with certainty the subject that is represented. Beethoven was completely possessed by a subject: his most significant tone pictures are indebted almost solely to the individuality of the subject that filled him; the consciousness of this made it seem to him superfluous to indicate his subject otherwise than in the tone picture itself. Just as our literary poets really address themselves only to other literary poets, so Beethoven, in these works, involuntarily addressed himself only to tone poets. The absolute musician, that is to say the manipulator of absolute music, could not understand Beethoven, because this absolute musician fastens only on the 'How,' and not the 'What.' The layman, on the other hand, could but be completely confused by these tone pictures, and at best only receive pleasure from that which to the tone poet was merely the material means of expression."[372]
Wagner recognised, however, the difficulty of grasping a poetic subject that had not been revealed by the composer, and held that it could only be divined by a poetic musician of the same kind. "If no special poetic subject is expressed in the tone speech, it may undoubtedly pass as easily understandable; for there can here be no question of real understanding. If, however, the expression of the tone speech is conditioned by a poetic subject, this speech at once becomes the most incomprehensible of all, unless the poetic subject be at the same time defined by some other means of expression than those of absolute music.
"The poetic subject of a tone piece by Beethoven is thus only to be divined by a tone poet; for, as I remarked before, Beethoven involuntarily appealed only to such, to those who were of like feelings, like culture, aye, well-nigh like capability with himself. Only a man like this can make these compositions intelligible to the laity, and above all by making the subject of the tone poem clear both to the executants and to the audience, and thus making good an involuntary error in the technique of the tone poet, who omitted this indication. Any other sort of performance of one of Beethoven's veritable tone poems, however technically perfect it may be, must remain incomprehensible in proportion as the understanding is not facilitated in the way I have suggested."[373]
This indeed, he held, was Beethoven's error—an error forced upon him by the conditions of his time—that he should endeavour to make his music truly human without giving the hearer the clue to the emotions upon which it was based. Beethoven's mistake, he says, in one of the happiest and most famous of his analogies, was the same as that of Columbus, who, though merely trying to find the way to the India that was already known, actually discovered thereby a new world.[374] His vain effort to "achieve the artistically necessary in the artistically impossible" has, however, revealed to the modern world the infinitely expressive capacity of music. But though it is only by being fertilised by poetry that music can attain to the full expression of the truly human, Wagner, as was to be expected from one who allowed so little liberty to the imagination in art, was against this fertilisation taking the form of programme music. The poetic content must be communicated immediately and visibly to the hearer by presentation on the stage. In all this, of course, he was once more merely expressing an individual bias, and one that is not in the least binding upon musicians in general. When the musician, he tells us, tries to paint by means of the orchestra alone, what he produces is neither music nor a painting.[375] He failed to perceive not only that instrumental music offers numberless instances of quite successful tone painting, but that a good deal of the pictorialism of his own music has to justify itself by means of the imagination alone. Every time the Feuerzauber, for example, is played in the concert room the imagination supplies, quite successfully, the spectacle of the flames; and even in the theatre it is left to the imagination to picture to itself the waves of the Rhine in the opening scene of the Rhinegold, for while the wave music is going on from the commencement the curtain does not rise until the 126th bar. There is no need to elaborate the point. Hundreds of composers, from Bach to the present day, have "painted" in music time without number without the assistance of a stage setting, the subject of the painting being quite sufficiently indicated either by the words of the poem,—the spinning-wheel in Schubert's Gretchen am Spinnrade, for example,—or by means of an explanatory note or title, as with the modern symphonic poem.
Without pursuing this side issue further now, let us follow up the more essential lines of the Wagnerian theory. We have seen him first of all frame his dramatic action in such a way that while making itself fully intelligible to the spectator it supplies the music with endless opportunities for the outpouring of feeling. Romance and "historical" drama have both been rejected because of their containing so much that, according to Wagner, appeals less to the feeling than to the intellect. It was in the myth that he found the condensation he desired. Upon the myth the composer was to pour out the full flood of his emotion. The form and quality of the musical utterance are to be determined by the poem. Lyrism must no longer be imposed upon the drama from without, as in the older opera, but must grow out of the drama as a necessary consequence. It follows that neither the chorus nor any of the characters is to be employed purely for the purposes of concerted music. In the orchestra the musician has at his disposal an instrument of unlimited expressiveness. The orchestra, as Wagner says, has a capacity of its own for speech. In the Beethoven symphony this capacity was developed to such a height as to urge the orchestra to make the vain attempt to deliver a message which from its very nature it was impossible for it to deliver clearly. That message, however, can be précisé by the Word: and the true function of the orchestra is to announce what cannot be conveyed by speech.[376] Its specific meaning can be still further précisé by means of gesture—not the ordinary gesture of the older opera, which derived solely from the dance pantomime, but gesture that is the visible counterpart of the auditory sensation communicated by the orchestra. The range of this kind of gesture is as wide as human emotion itself. Moreover, the orchestra can carry on the action even after speech and gesture have ceased; it can use themes in such a way as to create presentiment, and it can recall the past. The orchestra in fact, is to the drama of the future what the chorus was to the Greek drama,—a totalised individuality apart from, yet intimately bound up with, the separate individualities on the stage. The musical expression will vary in intensity according to the intensity of the situations. The form of the music drama will therefore be a unified one, but one containing the possibility of an infinite variety of expressions; but it will not be permissible to introduce any expression for the mere sake of musical effect; everything must grow spontaneously out of the emotions and situations presented by the poet. The drama can be thoroughly unified by the employment of salient "leading motives";[377] whereas the older opera had no unity at all, but was a mere conglomeration of arias, duets, ensembles, and so on.[378]
XV
It must be clear to almost every reader, after this exposition of Wagner's own views upon music in general and dramatic music in particular, that, paradoxical as it may seem, he was under a life-long illusion as to the nature of his own genius and the origin and significance of his reforms. So far from the poet in him shaping and controlling the musician, it was the musician who led the poet where he would have him go; so far from drama being with him the end and the music the means, it was music that was more than ever the end, to which the drama only served as means; and so far from Wagner being first and last a dramatist, the whole significance of his work lay precisely in the fact that he was a great symphonist. This last conclusion too may seem a paradox; but on a broad survey it will, I think, be seen to be true. It was not for nothing that Wagner always claimed descent from Beethoven rather than from even the greatest of opera writers, such as Gluck and Mozart and Weber. His instinct was a sound one; it was Beethoven's work that he was really carrying on. The whole of his productivity is given us, in essence, in the later stages of the Ring, in Tristan, and in the Meistersinger. It was to achieve such an expression, such a tissue, as this that he had been labouring and experimenting and thinking for nearly thirty years; and what are these works, seen with the historical eye of the twentieth century, but stupendous symphonies for orchestra and voices? He himself always proudly pointed to Tristan as the supremely successful realisation of all his theories as to the expressive capacity and the formal possibilities of music. Very well; Tristan is of all his works the most symphonic, the one that least needs the apparatus of the stage, the one in which the actors could most easily be dispensed with for long stretches of time with the minimum of loss.
I have already pointed out that he was probably the only musician in Europe in the 'thirties and 'forties with an intuition of all that the achievements of the later Beethoven meant for music.[379] All through Wagner's theoretical writings runs the same simile of music as a vast sea, on which Beethoven alone had so far been able to trust himself with any freedom. While the other composers of his day—and indeed of a later day, as the case of Brahms shows—had little idea beyond cruising in Beethoven's track with more or less varied merchandise, Wagner even as a boy saw the infinite wonders that were awaiting the first mariner who should have the courage to leave the shelter of the great bay and adventure out into the unknown main. He knew all that Beethoven had added to German music, the new emotions he had poured into it, the new logic of form with which he had endowed it. He knew also that as much could still be superadded to Beethoven as Beethoven had added to Mozart and Haydn; and the story of his evolution, both as dramatist and musician, is the story of this gradual extension of the borders of the Beethoven territory.
He had in abundance what has hitherto been almost the exclusive possession of the German school of music,—the sense of a far-sweeping logic of form. He had the rigorous, clean-cutting intellect that instinctively makes straight for what is the very essence of form—the spontaneous shaping of an idea, by itself, for itself, into the lines and colours most natural to it. "Swords without blades" was his contemptuous description of the empty rules of "form" that they sell in schools and text-books, much as the chemist sells the dried leaves of flowers. The true artist, he says, is always creating forms without knowing it.[380] His problem was to find the new form that should be as valid for what he had to say as Beethoven's form was for him. No such form was then in existence. In this respect he was far less fortunate than any of his great predecessors or successors; each of them had found his work all the easier in that he began with an inherited form, of opera or of instrumental music, which he simply exploited or expanded according to his necessities. Wagner's glance round upon the music of his day showed him that there was no form that he could take up and patch or hammer into a serviceable instrument. The symphony was not, nor is it yet, a truly logical form. Its divisions, the number of its divisions, the order of its divisions, are all in large part arbitrary and conventional. Within each of the frames made by these divisions it had to submit itself to a more or less formalistic method of procedure that was often at variance with the very nature of the idea. Even Beethoven, giant as he was, could not quite burst the bonds of custom and prescription. Wagner's favourite illustration of the clash that sometimes occurred between the traditional form and a new artistic purpose was the repeat in the Leonora No. 3 Overture. The controlling influence in the evolution of symphonic form had been the dance; the business of music had primarily been to make what variable play it could with certain given thematic figures. But bit by bit there had stolen into instrumental music the desire for more than this—the desire to follow out in tone not the changing aspects of a theme alone but the vicissitudes of a dramatic idea; and composers had long felt that the logic of the latter must be something other than the logic of the former, though as yet they did not quite know how to attain the structure they wanted. The purely thematic working-out aimed mostly at alternation: the dramatic working-out must depend mostly on psychological development. "It is obvious," says Wagner, "that in the conflict of a dramatic idea with [symphonic] form, there must at once arise the necessity of either sacrificing the development (the idea) to the alternation (the form), or the latter to the former.... I once held up Gluck's Overture to Iphigenia in Aulis as a model, because the master, with the surest feeling for the nature of the problem we are now considering, had here so happily understood that he must open his drama with an alternation of moods and their antitheses, in keeping with the overture form, instead of with a development impossible in that form. That the great masters who came after him, however, felt themselves circumscribed by this, we may clearly see in Beethoven's overtures; the composer knew the infinitely richer delineations of which his music was capable; he felt equal to carrying out the idea of development; and nowhere do we realise this more distinctly than in the great Leonora Overture. But anyone with eyes can see precisely in this overture how prejudicial to Beethoven the retention of the transmitted form was bound to be; for who that is capable of understanding such a work will not agree with me that its weakness consists in the repetition of the first part after the middle section, whereby the idea of the work is marred almost to the point of making it unintelligible; and that the more as in all the other parts, and especially at the end, Beethoven is obviously governed simply by the dramatic development? But whoever is intelligent and unprejudiced enough to see this must also admit that this mishap could only have been avoided by forswearing the repetition altogether—which, however, would mean the abrogation of the overture form, i.e. the original symphonic dance form with its mere play of motives (nur motivirte), and the first step towards the shaping of a new form."[381]
XVI
Beethoven, in fact, had brought a new spirit into the symphony and the overture without being able to discover a new and inevitable form in which this spirit could express itself. Wagner from his earliest years must have felt that he too had a dim perception of a new world of expression, if only he could discover the form for it. That form clearly did not exist in the symphony even as Beethoven had left it, for Wagner's vision was ready to take a bolder poetic flight even than Beethoven's, and it would have been as sadly hampered by the more freely symphonic but still largely formal method of Beethoven as the latter had been by the traditions of form he had taken over from his predecessors. It was still more useless for Wagner to seek the new logic of form in the other great art-genre of his day—the opera—for here illogic reigned supreme. The opera not only did not achieve the unity it professed to aim at; it did not even let either of its two great and ever warring constituents tyrannise effectively over the other. Instead, each merely lamed the other; the average opera was neither a good play spoiled by music, nor good music spoiled by a play, but merely a bad play and formless music adding each to the other's foolishness. How hopelessly impotent the current opera was to furnish a form that should be adequate for all that a modern musician might have to say was shown by the practice of Beethoven: the greatest musical brain of its epoch turned in anger and disappointment and disgust from the opera after one experiment with it, and concentrated more and more on the symphonic forms, endeavouring to make these more expansive and more flexible.
A hundred composers and theorists had for a century past realised the insufficiency of the opera. Gluck's manifestos are known to every student. More than a generation after Gluck the same problems were still being discussed in virtually the same terms and with the same results. Theory was evidently a long way ahead of practice; but even theory failed because it missed just the one seminal thing that it was Wagner's function to bring to light. The excellencies and the final limitations of the theory of the time are best seen in a rather remarkable work—Ignaz Franz Mosel's Versuch einer Aesthetik des dramatischen Tonsatzes ("Attempt at an Æsthetic of the Musical Drama")—that, curiously enough, was published in the year of Wagner's birth.[382] Much in this book might have been written by Gluck; some of it might even have been written by Wagner himself. Mosel expresses more clearly perhaps than any previous writer that conception of the unified art-work upon which Wagner so strongly insisted. For Mosel the ideal opera is a combination, on practically equal terms, of poetry, music, acting, singing and the art of the stage; the plastic arts, however, play a smaller part in his theory than they do in Wagner's. He regards the drama as the basis of opera. He sees, as Wagner did, that the rules of procedure of pure music are not applicable in their entirety to the dramatic stage. Like Wagner, again, he holds that complicated subjects, founded on intrigue or political action, are unsuitable for opera. Music being a purely emotional art, addressing itself more to the heart than the head, the best subject is that that gives full play to the emotional power of tone. The best subjects are the mythological ones. The poet must so shape his text that it is "thoroughly musical, that is, not only containing nothing that is outside the possibility of musical expression, but also nothing to which music cannot give a heightened beauty and a strengthened effect." The verse should be of such a kind that the composer's melody can spring naturally out of it. As a rule one syllable should be set to one note only. The melody must rise or fall precisely at the point where a good declaimer of the verses who is not musical would make them do so. Mosel sees that dramatic music frequently demands a different method of structure from that of pure music; as he puts it, the so-called musical period of two, four or eight-bar melodies can often be departed from with advantage. The style of the music as a whole must vary with the quality of the poetic subject; and not only must the general nature of the theme be reproduced in music, but also the physical, moral or conventional character of each person; and this adaptability of style to subject must be preserved in the orchestra as well as in the voice. The overture, having for its subject the preparation of the hearer for what is to come, must bear the same character as that which is dominant in the opera itself. There must be as little distinction as possible between recitative and aria. Form and expression must always follow the feeling. And so on and so on.
This was the sole result of a hundred years of keen theory and ardent practice. The form of opera remained virtually what it always had been; the most that anyone could suggest was a rationalising of the form here and there, the ridding it of some excrescence or absurdity. And so, in all probability, it would have remained for another hundred years, had not Wagner come with the conception that the old form itself was not worth tinkering with, but must be cast aside, and a new one made, not out of Mozart, not out of Gluck, not, indeed, out of any opera whatever, but out of the instrumental music of Beethoven. And this, I repeat, was a marvellous perception for one man out of all Europe's music-making millions to have.
His own accounts of the dawning of this idea upon him betray a fundamental inconsistency. On the one hand he is always stoutly asserting that he only found his way to the new music at the impulse and under the guidance of the poet. On the other hand it is clearer to us than it was to him that the poet in him was allowed to co-operate with the musician only in much the same way that he is allowed to co-operate in the symphonic poem. The musician, that is to say, feels a vague desire to express certain emotions of love, of pity, of terror, of aspiration; and he calls in the poet to supply him with a framework that shall be able to give consistency to his emotions and make the sequence of them intelligible to his hearers. Wagner, in his analysis of his own psychological processes, inverted the real relations of them, misled by the fact that as a musician he developed much later than as a poet—the obvious reason for this being that in poetry he had not, as in music, to make a new instrument, a new vocabulary and a new technique for himself. But even from his own account it is evident that the new ideal of music drama arose in him through the convergence of two great impressions—the acting and singing of Schröder-Devrient, and the later symphonies and quartets of Beethoven. He was amazed to find how much Schröder-Devrient could do in the way of dramatic expression with the poor puppets and absurd situations of the Italian opera stage. "I said to myself, what an incomparable work must that be, that in all its parts should be worthy of the histrionic talent of such an artist, and still more, of a body of artists like her." Then, he says, he got the idea of what could be done with the operatic genre "by turning the whole rich stream of German music, that Beethoven had swelled to the full, into the bed of the musical drama."[383]
And the essence of Beethoven's achievement, as he saw, was that not only had all the earlier formalism become inevitable form, but that form itself was dissolved in the idea; the Beethoven symphony becomes in the end simply a continuous flood of meaningful melody. "For it is surprising," he says, "that this method of procedure, developed in the field of instrumental music, should have been employed to some degree in mixed choral and orchestral music, but as yet never properly in opera.... Yet the possibility must exist of obtaining in the dramatic poem itself a poetic counterpart to the symphonic form, which, while it completely fills this copious form, should at the same time correspond to the inmost laws of dramatic form."[384]
The real ancestry of Wagner the opera writer is then clear enough; it is not an operatic but a symphonic ancestry. I therefore cannot wholly agree with Dr. Guido Adler that "as an opera composer Wagner stands in the frame of Renaissance art and culture. His fundamental aims coincide more or less with those of the founders of this culture epoch in general and of the representatives of the High Renaissance in the musical drama in particular.... The founders of the opera created the stilo rappresentativo, in which the musical expression was to follow the representation and the action as closely as possible.... The true theatre style proceeds historically from Peri, Monteverde and Cavalli to Wagner and Verdi. These are the representatives of emotionalism in music, of that fundamental æsthetic principle that recognises expression as the sole or main essence of music." [385] Resemblances between Wagner and the Renaissance founders of the opera there certainly are; but in comparison with the basic difference between him and them the resemblances are superficial. That basic difference is that while their reforms were born of the desire to model music upon and control it by speech, [386] Wagner's reform was born of the conception that the most copious and eloquent of musical instruments is the orchestra, to the emotions of which the voices, by means of words, can give direction and precision. Wagner's true lineage is that of instrumental music, the symphony and the symphonic poem. He is not the child either of the stage or of the song; the instrumental musician in him simply enters into an alliance with these for purposes of his own.
XVII
Of this he was more than half conscious himself; and it was always clear to him that as he was in the great line of instrumental succession, and that what he was doing was to extend still further the expressive range of instrumental, endlessly melodic music, it might be urged against him that the logical outcome of all his theory and his practice was not the opera but the symphonic poem or the programme symphony. But against that conclusion he always strenuously protested in advance. Something he saw there must be to make definite to the hearer the indefinite emotion of the music alone. He knew that the classical symphony was a work of composite origin, one movement of it—the Minuet or Scherzo,—still maintaining almost unchanged its dance-like character, while in the others the composer aimed more and more at emotional expression. But the musician was hampered here by the fact that the expression of emotion could not rise above a certain intensity without bursting the symphonic mould, and indeed prompting in the hearer a question as to the source of that emotion. There was, as Wagner says, "a certain fear of overstepping the bounds of musical expression, and especially of pitching the passionate, tragic tendency too high, for that would arouse feelings and expectations that would awake in the hearer the disquieting question of 'Why,'—which the musician himself could not answer satisfactorily."[387] But Wagner would not admit that this something might be a mere programme. "Not a programme, which rather provokes than silences the troublesome question of 'Why,' can therefore express the meaning of the symphony, but only the scenically-represented dramatic action itself."[388] With the liberation of musical expression from the stereotyped images set before it in the ordinary musical verse, and with the liberation of musical technique effected by the breaking down of the old operatic conventions of form, the power of music could be extended indefinitely. The poet would discover that "melodic form is capable of endlessly richer development than had previously been possible in the symphony itself, and, with a presentiment of this development, he will already project the poetical conception with perfect freedom. Thus where even the symphonist timidly reached back to the original dance-form—never daring, even for his expression, wholly to pass the boundaries that kept him in communication with this form—the poet will now cry to him: 'Throw yourself fearlessly into the full stream of the sea of music: hand in hand with me you can never lose touch with what is most comprehensible to all mankind; for through me you always stand on the ground of the dramatic action, and this action, in the moment of its representation on the stage, is the most immediately intelligible of all poems. Stretch your melody boldly out, that it may pour through the whole work like an endless flood: in it say what I leave unsaid, since only you can say it, and in silence I will utter all, since it is I who lead you by the hand."[389]
Here he is expressing only a personal bias. His own imagination was somewhat timid; it preferred the seen to the unseen, and he was consequently quite unable to take up the point of view of people to whom a thing mentally conceived is as impressive as, or even more impressive than, the same thing set bodily before their eyes. Had he had any inkling of this, he would not have brought so many animals upon the scene. The most striking instance of his inability to trust to the spectator's imagination is his vacillation over the ending of Tannhäuser. In the first version of the final scene, the last attempt of Venus to win back her old lover was shown only as a struggle in the mind of the frenzied Tannhäuser, with a red glow in the direction of the distant Hörselberg to make the cause of the madness clear. The death of Elisabeth was merely divined by the intuition of Wolfram, while the sound of far-off bells and the faint light of torches on the Wartburg gave the spectator the hint he needed for the full comprehension of the scene. Wagner was uncomfortable until he had made everything visible that had formerly been left to the imagination; Venus had to appear in person to Tannhäuser, and the bier of Elisabeth had to be carried across the stage. It would have been better, in this and in many other cases, had he reposed more faith in the imagination of his audience. But his theory and his practice were often inconsistent in this as in so many other cases. We have seen him objecting, à propos of Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet, to music that required an explanation outside itself to make it clear. But several of his own orchestral pieces are unintelligible without a verbal explanation or its equivalent. Who could make anything of the prelude to the third Act of Tannhäuser, for example, in the absence of such an explanation? It cannot even be said that the dramatic play of the motives is clear to anyone who has listened carefully to the opera, for the theme of Tannhäuser's pilgrimage, that is of such importance in the prelude, does not occur till the third Act; during the prelude to that Act the hearer who is listening to it for the first time is ignorant not merely of its meaning but of its very existence. How, again, can the audience be expected to know, the first time they hear it, that the opening theme of the prelude to the third Act of the Meistersinger symbolises Sachs's renunciation of Eva? The theme has appeared in the second Act as an orchestral counterpoint during one of the stanzas of the cobbling song. Even supposing the hearer to have any notion on that occasion that the theme is more than an ordinary counterpoint—that it has a psychological significance—how is he to know what this significance is; and how is he to read this meaning into it when he hears it at the commencement of the third Act? It all has to be made clear to him by a prose explanation, as Wagner himself recognised when he wrote his explanatory programme note upon the prelude. In the light of this and other instances that could be cited, how can Wagner consistently deny to other composers the right to call in the aid of verbal explanations for their symphonic poems or programme symphonies?
XVIII
There are as many contradictions between Wagner's theory and practice, indeed, as between his life and his art. Without attempting the impossible task of trying to reconcile them all, let us cast a rapid glance over the main features of his practice, which are far more important than his theory. From every side we are driven to the conclusion that the dominating force in him was the instrumental musician who was born to continue Beethoven's work in another sphere. As his powers developed, his music becomes more symphonic,[390] and he intuitively shapes his poems so as to allow the freest possible play to the symphonic succession and interweaving of themes. The characters serve to make the course of the story clear, and to give precision to the emotions that are being expressed by the orchestra. He saw in Beethoven's later works a colossal effort to make music free. Logic of some kind there must be in every piece of music. This logic depends fundamentally upon showing the inter-relation of each part of the music by the recurrence of significant themes; and broadly speaking there are only two ways of achieving this—by way of pattern or by way of poetry. At bottom all form, all logic, in music, in fiction, in drama, in architecture, in sculpture, is one in object and process; a coherent whole has to be made out of parts, and the parts have to justify their existence by showing themselves indispensable to the whole. Pattern form and poetic form embrace between them every mode of structure of which music is capable. Sometimes a piece of music leans markedly to the one or the other; but in the vast majority of cases the actual form is a union of the two, or a compromise between them. It was a compromise of this kind that Wagner detected in some of the greatest works of Beethoven; the form that had been evolved mainly with reference to pattern was being applied, with only partial success, to music the prime impulse of which was poetic—however vague this poetry might be, however incapable of expression in words. But while pattern form pure and simple tells its own story and is its own justification, poetic form needs to be explained and justified by the poetic idea that is at the root of it. Go beyond Beethoven, says Wagner, in the expression of poetic emotion, and your form will become so free that the hearer will no longer be able to see it in terms of the old pattern logic, and the music will seem to him formless and incoherent. You can only win the full freedom you need for the expression of definite as distinguished from indefinite emotion by telling the hearer the nature and the source of this emotion. As Wagner put it, poetic music in pattern form always prompts the question "Why?" The symphonic-poem writer answers with his programme: Wagner answered with the characters and the action of the programme set visibly before us on a stage. There is no such fundamental æsthetic difference between the two methods as Wagner imagined; the differences are only in detail.[391]
The curious thing is that, for all his theories, Wagner himself now and then wrote instrumental pieces that prompt a "Why?" as emphatically as anything of Beethoven's. He despised what he called the "quadrature musicians"—the composers who take refuge in phrases cut to a regulation length and pattern and worked-out in a stereotyped four-square form. Music meant little or nothing to him unless it spoke directly of humanity and to humanity. No theme must be invented for mere invention's sake, or worked-out for the mere sake of working-out; it must spring into being as the expression of an overwhelming human need or of some blinding vision, and must answer in all its changes to the changing life of the man or mood it painted. It was this inevitableness of idea and of form that he admired in Beethoven and missed in Brahms. His inability to compromise on the matter made him contemptuously sweep out of existence most of the music of his day. It was precisely in this broadening of the Beethovenian spirit and design, and the making them capable of expressing every emotion that mankind can feel, that he opened out such enormous possibilities in music.
The ordinary "abstract" composer's mind must have been a pure puzzle to a man like him, who could not understand how modern music could have any raison d'être apart from something definitely poetic or pictorial to be expressed. To invent a theme for its own abstract sake, to pare and shape it till it was "workable," and then to weave it along with others of the same kind into a pattern of which the main lines were predetermined for him by tradition—this was something he could not imagine himself doing, and that he scoffed at when he found the Conservatoire musician engaged in it. "I simply cannot compose at all," he said once, "when nothing occurs to me."[392] He must always have a definite subject, which was to determine the nature, of the theme and control the whole course of the development. Looking back through the music of the generation that has followed him, we can see how penetrating his vision was in all questions of expression and form. Beethoven's innovations, he points out, were mostly in the field of rhythmic distribution, not that of harmonic modulation. Rhythmic changes of all kinds come naturally within the scope of the ordinary symphonic movement, which is in essence an ideal dance; but startling melodic or harmonic changes, or attempted subtleties of form, generally prompt that awkward question "Why?" and leave it unanswered. Take, for example, the efforts that have been made in our own day to unify the four-movement sonata form by the carrying over of themes from one movement to another, as in César Franck's violin and pianoforte sonata. Attach a poetic significance to a theme, and its recurrence in another movement explains itself; but in a piece of ostensibly abstract music the recurrence simply puzzles us. No satisfactory answer can be given—except in terms of a programme—to the question why a theme that has apparently served its purpose should be resuscitated by the composer at a later stage, in preference to the invention of a fresh theme. For every effect the composer makes, the logician in us insists upon knowing the cause. Hence the soundness of Wagner's advice to the modern composer—Do not consciously aim at harmonic and instrumental effects, but wait till there is a sufficient cause for them.[393] His own practice was a model of restraint: not one modulation, not one subtilisation of the harmony, not one addition to the orchestral weight without a thoroughly good reason, rooted in the nature of the idea itself. "In the instrumental prelude to the Rhinegold, for instance," he says, "it was impossible for me to quit the fundamental note, for there was no reason whatever for changing it. A great part of the not unanimated theme that follows between Alberich and the Rhine Maidens permitted of modulation only to the most closely related keys, since passion still expresses itself here in its most primitive naïveté."[394] The rule he would enforce upon pupils is this, "Never leave a key so long as what you have to say can still be said in it." And only when the emotion becomes more complex must the harmony be coloured more subtly to correspond. This, he lays it down, constitutes the great difference between the symphonic and the dramatic development of themes. In the former the effect is meant to be kaleidoscopic; and a real master can work wonders in the arabesque-like combination and transformation of simple material. But do what he will he cannot venture upon the variety of the dramatic composer, for if he goes beyond a certain point of audacity or singularity he ceases to be intelligible in terms of pure music. "Neither a mere play of counterpoint, nor the most fanciful devices of figuration or harmonic invention, either could or should transform a theme so characteristically and give it so many and so varied expressions—and yet keep it always recognisable—as true dramatic art can do quite naturally." Proof of this can be had by pursuing the simple theme of the Rhine Maidens—