Rhinegold! Rhinegold!
"through all the changing passions of the four-part drama, down to Hagen's watch song in the first Act of the Götterdämmerung, where it appears in a form that, to me at any rate, is simply unthinkable as the theme of a symphonic movement, albeit it still has its raison d'être in the laws of harmony and thematism, though only in their application to the drama. But to try to apply what is thus made possible to the symphony itself must necessarily lead to the complete ruin of the latter; for there it would be merely a deliberate 'effect,' while in the other case it has a motive."[395] And he ends with the theory that symphonic music and dramatic music are two quite different modes of expression, and that only errors of practice and of judgment can come from the attempt to blend them. This dictum the musicians of a later day can accept only with reservations. We admit that he did well to draw a line of sharp distinction between the older symphonic moods and forms and those of musical drama. But he overlooked the fact that the basic distinction was not between symphony and drama, but between purely abstract music of all kinds and purely poetic music of all kinds. There are procedures open to the latter that are still not open to the former—virtually as many procedures, indeed, as are open to opera itself. For the principle of the symphonic poem is at bottom the same as that of the musical drama—to follow in music the vicissitudes of a poetic idea; and given a knowledge on our part of this idea, whether it be communicated to us by a stage action or by a prose or poetic explanation, the composer is at liberty to indulge in as many audacities of melody, of harmony, of modulation as may be justified by the nature of his subject. Wagner, as I have tried to show, was prevented from applying his own principles to purely instrumental poetic music by his inability to follow the "moments" of an action that was merely suggested to him, instead of being realised in a theatre. But there is no reason why we should fail to draw the conclusion that is obviously implicit in Wagner's own argument as to the relations of music and poetic suggestion. The strange thing is that every now and then he himself made an excursion into the fields he attempted to close to others. His Faust Overture, for example, is a pure symphonic poem, the full meaning of which only becomes apparent to us when we know the poetic subject. The opening tuba theme is of a type that a composer would hesitate to use for the opening "subject" of a symphony; it receives both its explanation and its justification solely from our knowledge that it depicts the world-weary Faust. The case of the Siegfried Idyl is still more instructive. That exquisite piece of music puzzles us once or twice by the apparent abruptness of its transitions. We might have guessed, from our knowledge of Wagner's precepts and practice, that he is following a quasi-poetic scheme of his own, and that the music does not always tell a coherent story to us because he has seen fit to keep this scheme from us. We now know for certain, on the testimony of Glasenapp, that this is so. Here we have another instance of flat contradiction between Wagner's theory and his practice. But had he reflected that a knowledge of the poetic basis of the Siegfried Idyl is necessary to us if we are to see the same coherence in the music that he saw, he would have been bound to admit that the communication of the poetic basis of any symphonic poem will justify the composer writing in a style that would be unsuitable to abstract music—a style differing very little in its fundamentals from that of the Wagnerian stage. No middle course is possible: whatever justifies the Wagnerian music drama justifies also Till Eulenspiegel and the L'Après-midi d'un Faune—not for Wagner perhaps, but certainly for us.
His intransigent attitude towards programme music is all the stranger in view of the fact that he persistently read concrete meanings or events into the music that moved him. Everyone knows his interpretation of certain of Beethoven's symphonies and the C sharp minor quartet. He read quasi-pictures and even words into certain of Bach's fugues; for the seventeenth fugue and the twenty-fourth prelude he had half a mind to write appropriate words. He ought to have seen that if instrumental music could thus suggest concrete associations, similar associations could also suggest music to correspond with them, and that the logical and inevitable outcome of this alliance between music and poetic suggestion is programme music. It is interesting to learn, however, that in his last days he often talked of writing a symphony. He had, he says, no lack of ideas; his difficulty was to stop inventing. His symphony would have been in one movement only; "the finales are the awkward things [Klippe]; I will steer clear of them; I will keep to one-movement symphonies." Nor would he base them on the old system of theme-contrast. Beethoven had exhausted the possibilities of that form. His own style would be that of an endless melodic web—the principle, indeed, that we can see at work in all the operas of his maturity. "Only," he added, "no drama"; evidently his prejudice against story music apart from the stage persisted to the end. The projected symphonies would apparently have been on the lines of the Siegfried Idyl and the larger pianoforte works such as the Albumblatt for Betty Schott (1875), the Albumblatt for the Princess Metternich (1861), the Album Sonata for Frau Wesendonck (1853), and the Ankunft bei den schwarzen Schwänen (1861). If so, we should probably be compelled to pass the same criticism upon the symphonies as we do upon these works—that in spite of their unquestionable beauty we are sometimes at a loss to see the same coherence in them that they must have had for him. In the lengthy Album Sonata for Frau Wesendonck, for example, we feel that he is all the while following the outlines of some unavowed poetic theme, slackening and tightening the expression, lightening and darkening it, hurrying and pausing, in conformity with the demands of that. A musical picture of this kind, that disdains formal development of the pattern order, and simply weaves its tissue out of moods, is much more difficult on a large scale than on a small one. The trouble begins when a transition has to be made from one mood to another. In his last days Wagner was capable of wonderful quasi-symphonic meditations on a given theme; nothing could surpass for pure beauty or for continuity of invention the long orchestral passage that accompanies Kundry's account of Parsifal's mother (vocal score, p. 187 ff.). We feel that Wagner could have indeed worked marvels in this way to the end: but, as he himself once said in a letter to Frau Wesendonck, the art of composition is really the art of transition; and one fears that his symphonic transitions would have failed to make their reasons clear to us. The astounding tissue of the Götterdämmerung teems with transitions of the most abrupt kind; but they are all intelligible because the physiognomies of the leit-motives are familiar to us, and every allusion is instantaneously clear. Their logic is only partly in themselves, and partly in the poetic ideas of which they are the symbols. It seems probable that his symphonies would have been Siegfried Idyls on a larger scale, possessing every virtue but that of inevitable continuity.