The “Florentine Revolution” was an attempt to create an entirely new type of opera in which all tradition was thrown to the winds. To “Eurydice,” the best known of these Florentine operas, its composer, Peri, wrote a preface, from which we quote the following: “Therefore, abandoning every style of vocal writing known hitherto, I gave myself up wholly to contriving the sort of imitation (of speech) demanded by this poem.” (Is this, indeed, Peri speaking? Or is it Gluck, or Wagner, or Debussy?) In any case, the abandonment, in any form of human expression, of every style known hitherto is a fatal abandonment, for no art, or science, or literature can throw away its past and live. The Florentine Revolution was not revolution, but riot, for it undertook to tear down what generations had been slowly building up, and to substitute in its place something not only untried but (at that time) impossible. It was an attempt to found a new art entirely detached from an old one. Beethoven without Haydn and Mozart, Meredith without Fielding, the Gothic without the Classical, a Renaissance without a birth, daylight without sunrise. It was an entirely illogical proceeding from first to last, but opera came forth from it because opera can subsist—it has, and does—without logic or even reasonableness.
There had been composed before the year 1600 the most beautiful sacred music the world possesses—that which culminated in the works of Palestrina. A style or method of expression had been perfected, and this style or method was gradually and naturally being applied to secular and even to dramatic forms. There were at that time, also, songs of the people which had been often used in plays with music, and which might have supplied a basis for opera. But the creators of the new opera would have none of these. They had a theory (fatal possession for any artist): they wanted to revive the Greek drama, and they believed that, in opera, music should be subservient to the text. It was Peri and his associates who first saw this will-o’-the-wisp, which has since become completely embodied into a fully equipped and valiant bugaboo to frighten and subdue those who love music for music’s sake. All that one needs to say on this point is that there is no great opera in existence, save alone “Pelléas et Mélisande” by Debussy, in which the music is not supreme over the text (and Debussy’s opera is unique in its treatment and leads nowhere—or, if anywhere, away from opera). Peri’s reforms were artistically unreasonable, but the composers who followed him gradually evolved what is called the aria or operatic song and did eventually make a more or less coherent operatic form, although a long time passed before opera unified in itself the various elements necessary to artistic completeness.
It was only a short time, however, before opera attained the widest favor all over Europe, a favor which it has enjoyed from that day to this. The reasons for this never-waning popularity are found first in the natural preference on the part of the public for the human voice over any instrument. For whatever facility of technique or felicity of expression musical instruments may have, they lack the intimate human quality of the singing voice. The voice comes to the listener in terms of himself, whereas an instrument may be strange and unsympathetic and awaken no response. So complete is this sympathy between the singer and listener that almost any singer with a fine voice (she is, very likely, called a “human nightingale”) is sure to attract an audience, no matter what she sings or how little musical intelligence she shows. (It is this sympathy, too, which inflicts on us the drawing-room song, the last word in utter vacuity.) Coupled with this is the delight the public takes in extraordinary vocal feats of agility. The singer vies with a flute in the orchestra, or sings two or three notes higher than any other singer has ever sung, and the public crowds to hear her. But it is useless to dwell on this: the disease is incurable; there will always be, I fear, an unthinking public ready for any vocal gymnast who sings higher or faster than anybody else, or who can toss off trills and runs with a smiling face and a pretty costume, and in entirely unintelligible words. And, second, when this singing, which the public dearly loves, is coupled with the perennial fascination of the drama, the appeal is irresistible.
I do not need to dwell here on the quality in the drama which has made it popular from the remotest time until now. One can say this, however: that to people who are incapable of re-creating a world of beauty in their own minds—although nature surrounds them with it, and imaginative literature is in every library—the stage is a perpetual delight. There they behold impossible romances, incredible virtues and vices, heroes and heroines foully persecuted but inevitably triumphant, impossible scenes in improbable countries, everything left out that is tiresome and habitual and necessitous, no blare of daylight but only golden sunrise and flaming sunset: the impossible realized at last. These qualities are in all drama to a greater or less extent, for they embody the essence of what the drama is. Æschylus and Shakespeare divest life of its prose as completely as does a raging melodrama, for a play must move from one dramatic and salient point to another; and while those great dramatists imply the whole of life,—whereas the ordinary play implies nothing,—they do not and cannot present it in its actual and complete continuity.
Now the drama is subject more or less to public opinion and to public taste, because in the drama we understand what we are hearing. On the other hand the opera, considered as drama, is almost free from any such responsibility, because it is sung in a foreign language; or if, by chance, in our own tongue, the size of the opera house and the disinclination of singers to pay any attention to their diction renders the text unintelligible. So the libretto of the opera escapes scrutiny. “What is too silly to be said is sung,” says Voltaire.
Let us note also that when an art becomes detached from its own past, when it is not based on natural human life, and does not obey those general laws to which all art is subject, it is sure to evolve conventions of one sort or another and to become artificial. This is to be observed in what is called the “rococo” style of architecture, as well as in the terrible objects perpetrated by the “futurists” and “cubists” (anything that is of the future must also be of the past, no matter whether it is a picture, or a tree, or an idea). Opera was soon in the grip of these conventions from which, with a few notable exceptions, it has never escaped. Even the common conventions of the drama, which we accept readily enough, are in opera stretched to the breaking point. For many generations operas were planned according to a set, inflexible scheme of acts; a woman took a man’s part (as in Gounod’s “Faust”); characters were stereotyped; the position of the chief aria (solo) for the prima donna was exactly determined so as to give to her entrance all possible impressiveness; the set musical pieces (solos, duets, choruses, and so forth) were arranged artificially and not to satisfy any dramatic necessity. There is some justness in Wagner’s saying that the old conventional opera was “a concert in costume.”
An example of this conventionality and lack of dramatic unity may be found in the famous quartette scene in Verdi’s “Rigoletto,” an opera which is typical of the Italian style (in which, in Meredith’s phrase, “there is much dallying with beauty in the thick of sweet anguish”). In this scene there are two persons in hiding to watch two others. The concealment is the hinge upon which, for the moment, the story swings. But the exigencies of the music are such that, before the piece has progressed very far, all four are singing at the top of their lungs and with no pretext of concealment—in a charming piece of music, indeed, but quite divested of dramatic truth and unity. And then, naturally enough, the thin veneer of drama having been pierced, they answer your applause by joining hands and bowing, after which the two conceal themselves again, the music strikes up as before, and the whole scene is repeated.
But one of the most artificial elements in the old operas was the ballet. Its part in the opera scheme was purely to be a spectacle, and great sums were lavishly spent to make it as gorgeous as possible. It had usually nothing whatever to do with the story, but was useful in drawing an audience of pleasure-lovers who did not take opera seriously. Once upon a time, in London, by an extraordinary unlucky stroke of fate, Carlyle was persuaded to go to hear an opera containing a ballet; whereupon he fulminated as follows: “The very ballet girls, with their muslin saucers round them, were perhaps little short of miraculous; whirling and spinning there in strange mad vortexes, and then suddenly fixing themselves motionless, each upon her left or right great toe, with the other leg stretched out at an angle of ninety degrees—as if you had suddenly pricked into the floor, by one of their points, a pair, or rather a multitudinous cohort, of mad restlessly jumping and clipping scissors, and so bidden them rest, with open blades, and stand still in the Devil’s name!”
One remembers, also, “War and Peace,” with its scene at the opera—and Tolstoï’s reference to the chief male dancer as getting “sixty thousand francs a year for cutting capers.” So, looking over the older operas which still hold their place in the repertoire, we think of them as rather absurd, and comfort ourselves with the reflection that to-day opera has outgrown its youthful follies and has become a work of art.
Then came the second great operatic reform,—that of Wagner,—which was supposed to free us from the old absurdities and make of opera a reasonable and congruous thing. This, Wagner’s operas, at the outset, bade fair to be. In “Der Fliegende Holländer,” “Tannhäuser,” and “Lohengrin” there is a reasonable correspondence between the action and the music; we can listen and look without too great disruption of our faculties. Wagner’s librettos are, with one exception, based on mythological stories or ideas. His personages are eternal types—Lohengrin of purity and heroism, Wotan of power by fiat, Brunhilde (greatest of them all) of heroic and noble womanhood. He adopted the old device by means of which certain salient qualities in his characters—such as Siegfried’s youth and fearlessness, Wotan’s majesty, and so forth—were defined by short phrases of music called leit-motifs; he made his orchestra eloquent of the movement of his drama, instead of employing it as a “huge guitar”; he eliminated the set musical piece, which was bound to delay the action; he kept his music always moving onward by avoiding the so-called “authentic cadence,” which in all the older music perpetually cries a halt.
But by all these means Wagner imposed on his listener a constant strain of attention: leit-motifs recurring, developing, and disintegrating, every note significant, a huge and eloquent orchestra, a voice singing phrases which are not parts of a complete melody then and there being evolved,—as in an opera by Verdi,—but which are related to something first heard perhaps half an hour before in a preceding act (or a week before in another drama): we have all this to strain every possibility of our appreciative faculty, and at the same time he asks us to watch an actual combat between a hero and a dragon, or to observe another between two heroes half in the clouds with a God resplendent stretching out a holy spear to end the duel as he wills it, while a Valkyrie hovers above on her flying steed. Or he sets his drama under water, with Undines swimming about and a gnome clambering the slippery rocks to filch a jewel in exchange for his soul. Yes, even this, and more; for he asks us to witness the end of the world—the waters rising, the very heavens aflame—when our heart is so torn by the stupendous inner tragedy of Brunhilde’s immolation that the end of the world seems utterly and completely irrevelant and impertinent.
After all, we are human. We cannot be men and women and, at the same time, children. We should like to crouch down in our seat in the opera house and forget everything save the noble, splendid, and beautiful music, seeing only just so much action as would accord with our state of inner exaltation. An opera must be objective or subjective; it cannot be both at the same time. The perfection of “Don Giovanni” is due to the exact equality between the amount and intensity of the action and of the musical expression—or, in other words, to the complete union of matter and manner, of form and style. The “Ring” cycle is objective and subjective; it is the extreme of stage mechanism (and more), and, at the same time, everything that is imaginatively profound and moving. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that Wagner in those great music-dramas lost sight of the balance between means and ends, and the proportion between action and thought. His own theories, and the magnitude of his subject, led him to forget the natural limitations which are imposed upon a work of art by the very nature of those beings for whom it was created. The “Ring” dramas should be both acted and witnessed by gods and goddesses for whom time and space do not exist, and who are not limited by a precarious nervous system. No one can be insensitive to the great beauty of certain portions of these gigantic music-dramas,—every one recognizes Wagner’s genius as it shows itself, for example, in either of the great scenes between Siegfried and Brunhilde,—but the intricate and well-nigh impossible stage mechanism and the excursions into the written drama constitute serious defects. (For the scene between Wotan and Fricka in “Das Rheingold” and similar passages in the succeeding dramas are essentially scenes to be read rather than acted.)
One would suppose that Wagner had made impossible any repetition of the old operatic incongruities. Quite the contrary is the case. One of the latest Italian operas is, if anything, more absurd than any of its predecessors. What could be more grotesque than an opera whose scene is in a mining camp in the West, whose characters include a gambler, a sheriff, a woman of the camp, and so forth, whose language is perforce very much in the vernacular, whose plot hinges on a game of cards,—an “Outcast-of-Poker-Flat” opera,—and this translated, for the benefit of the composer, into Italian and produced in that language? “I’m dead gone on you, Minnie,” says Rance; “Ti voglio bene, Minnie,” sings his Italian counterpart.
“Rigoletto” does entrance us by the beauty and the sincerity of its melodies; it is what it pretends to be; it deals with emotions which we can share because they derive ultimately from great human issues. The Count, Magdalina, Rigoletto, and Gilda are all types; we know them well in literature—in poetry, novel, and drama; they are valid. We accept the strained convention of the scene as being inevitable at that point in the development of the opera. But after Wagner’s reforms, and the influence they exerted on Verdi himself, the greatest of the Italians, it would seem incredible that any composer could lapse into a “Girl of the Golden West.”
Nearly all Puccini’s operas are a reversion to type. The old-fashioned lurid melodrama appears again, blood-red as usual; as in “La Tosca,” which leaves almost nothing to the imagination—one specially wishes that it did in certain scenes. “Local color,” so-called, appears again in all its arid deception—as in the Japanese effects in the music of “Madame Butterfly”; again we hear the specious melody pretending to be real, with its octaves in the orchestra to give it a sham intensity. It is the old operatic world all over again. When we compare any tragic scene in Puccini’s operas with the last act of Verdi’s “Otello,” we realize the vast difference between the two. It is true that Puccini gives us beautiful lyric moments—as when Mimi, in “La Bohème,” tells Rudolph who she is; it is true, also, that we ought not to cavil because Puccini is not as great a composer as Verdi. Our comparison is not for the purpose of decrying one at the expense of the other, but to point out that the greater opera is not called for by the public and the lesser is; that we get “La Bohème,” “Madame Butterfly,” and “La Tosca” twenty times to “Otello’s” once, and that we thereby lose all sense of operatic values.
The most trumpeted operatic composer of to-day is the worst of operatic sinners. Nothing could be more debasing to music and to drama than the method Strauss employs in “Electra.” In its original form “Electra” is a play of profound significance, whose art, philosophy, and ethics are a natural expression of Greek life and thought. It contains ideas and it presents actions which, while totally alien to us, we accept as belonging to that life and thought. In the original, or in any good translation, its simplicity and its elemental grandeur are calculated to move us deeply, for we achieve a historical perspective and see the meaning and significance of the catastrophe which it presents. This great story our modern composer proceeds to treat pathologically. Nothing is sacred to him. He invests every passion, every fearful deed with a personal and immediate significance which entirely destroys its artistic and its historical sense. The real “Electra” is an impersonal, typical, national, and religious drama; Hofmannsthal and Strauss have made it into a seething caldron of riotous, unbridled passion.
The lead given by Strauss in “Salome,” “Electra,” and, in different form or type, in “Der Rosenkavallier” has been quickly followed. “The Jewels of the Madonna” is an “Electra” of the boulevard, in which the worst sort of passion and the worst sort of sacrilege are flaunted openly in the name of drama. It belongs in the “Grand Guignol.” Let any reasonable person read the librettos of current operas and form an opinion, not of their morals,—for there is only one opinion about that,—but of their claims on the attention of any serious-minded person.
I refer to the moral status of these stories only because many of them stress the abnormal and lack a sense of proportion. Art seeks the truth wherever it be, but the truth is the whole truth and not a segment of it. A novel may represent almost any phase of life, but it must keep a sense of proportion. Dostoïevsky pushes the abnormal to the extreme limit, but on the other hand he is “a brother to his villains” and he gives us plenty of redeeming types. The hero in “The Idiot” is a predominating and overbalancing character. The object of all great literature is to present the truth in terms of beauty. “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” is as moral as “Emma.” But the further one gets from a deliberate form of artistic expression like the novel, the less latitude one has in this respect. An episode in a novel of Dostoïevsky would be an impossible subject for a picture. So opera, which focuses itself for us in the stage frame and within a limited time, must somehow preserve for itself this truthfulness and fidelity to life as it is. “The Jewels of the Madonna” might serve as an episode in a novel of Dostoïevsky, or of Balzac; as an opera libretto it is a monstrosity.
I have referred to these various inconsistencies and absurdities of opera, not with the idea of making out a case against it; on the contrary, I want to make out a case for it. This obviously can be done only by means of operas which are guiltless of absurdities and of melodramatic exaggeration, which answer the requirements of artistic reasonableness, and are, at the same time, beautiful. This cannot be said of “Cavalleria Rusticana” (Rustic Chivalry—Heaven save the mark!), “La Bohème,” “La Tosca,” “The Girl of the Golden West,” “Thaïs” (poison, infidelity, suicide, sorcery, and religion mixed up in an intolerable mélange), “Contes d’Hoffman” (a Don Juan telling his adventures in detail)—these are bad art, not because they are immoral, but because they are untrue, distorted, without sense of the value of the material they employ.
Operas which are both beautiful and reasonable do exist, and one or two of them are actually in our present-day repertoire. The questions we have to ask are these: Can a highly imaginative and significant drama, in which action and reflection hold a proper balance, in which some great and moving passion or some elemental human motives find true dramatic expression—can such a drama exist as opera? Is it possible to preserve the body and the spirit of drama and at the same time to preserve the body and spirit of music? Does not one of these have to give way to the other? We want opera to be one thing, and not several. We want the same unity which exists in other artistic forms. We want to separate classic, romantic, and realistic. If opera changes from blank verse to rhymed verse, so to speak, we want the change to be dictated by an artistic necessity as it is in “As You Like It.” We want, above all, such a reasonable correspondence between seeing and hearing as shall make it possible for us to preserve each sense unimpaired by the other. A few such operas have been composed. A considerable number approach this ideal. From Gluck’s “Orfeo” (produced in 1762) to Wagner’s “Tristan” (1865) the pure conception of opera has always been kept alive. Gluck, Mozart, Weber, Wagner, and Verdi are the great names that stand out above the general level.
Gluck’s “Orfeo” is even more interesting since the dark shadow of Strauss’s “Electra” has appeared to throw it into relief. Once in a decade or two “Orfeo” is revived to reveal anew how nobly Gluck interpreted the old Greek story. And it must be remembered that Gluck lived in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when music was quite inflexible in the matter of those dissonances which are considered by modern composers absolutely necessary to the expression of dramatic passion.
After Gluck came Mozart with his “Don Giovanni,” preserving the same balance between action and emotion, with an even greater unity of style and the same sincerity of utterance. Mozart possessed a supreme mastery over all his material, and a unique gift for creating pure and lucid melody. In his operas there is no admixture: his tragedy and his comedy are alike purely objective—and it is chiefly this quality which prevents our understanding them. We, in our day and age, cannot project ourselves into Mozart’s milieu; the tragedy at the close of “Don Giovanni” moves us no whit because it is devoid of shrieking dissonances and thunders of orchestral sound. Our nervous systems are adjusted to instrumental cataclysms. (We are conscious only of a falling star; the serene and placid Heavens look down on us in vain.) Could we hear “Don Giovanni” in a small opera house sung in pure classic style, we should realize how beautiful it is; we should no longer crave the over-excitement and unrestrained passion of “La Tosca”; we should understand that the deepest passion is expressible without tearing itself to tatters, and that music may be unutterably tragic in simple major and minor mode. Don Giovanni is a type of operatic hero,—he may be found in some modified form in half the operas ever written,—but Mozart lifts him far above his petty intrigues and makes him a great figure standing for certain elements in human nature. (It is the failure of Gounod to accomplish this which puts “Faust” on the lower plane it occupies.) The stage setting of “Don Giovanni,”—the conventional rooms with gilt chairs, and the like,—the costumes, the acting, the music (orchestral and vocal), are all unified in one style. And this, coupled with the supreme mastery and the melodic gift of its composer, makes it one of the most perfect, if not the most perfect, of operas.
Beethoven’s “Fidelio” (produced in 1805) celebrates the devotion and self-sacrifice of a woman—and that devotion and self-sacrifice actually have for their object her husband! It is a noble opera, but Beethoven’s mind and temperament were not suited to the operatic problem, and “Fidelio” is not by any means a perfect work of art. The Beethoven we hear there is the Beethoven of the slow movements of the sonatas and symphonies; but we could well hear “Fidelio” often, for it stands alone in its utter sincerity and grandeur.
The romantic operas of Weber tend toward that characterization which is the essential equality of his great successor, Wagner, for “Der Freischütz” and “Euryanthe” are full of characteristic music. Weber begins and ends romantic opera. (Romantic subjects are common enough, but romantic treatment is exceedingly uncommon. Scott’s “Bride of Lammermoor,” for example, in passing through the hands of librettist and composer becomes—in Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor”—considerably tinged with melodrama.) There is evidence enough in “Der Freischütz” and “Euryanthe” of Weber’s sincerity and desire to make his operas artistic units. Each of them conveys a definite impression of beauty and avoids those specious appeals so common in opera.
Meanwhile, in the early part of the nineteenth century, opéra comique was flourishing in France. Auber, Hérold, Boieldieu, and other composers were producing works in which the impossible happenings of grand opera were made possible by humor and lightness of touch. The words of these composers are full of delightful melody and are more reasonable and true than are many better-known grand operas.
Then comes the Wagnerian period, with its preponderance of drama over music. In “Tristan und Isolde” Wagner, by his own confession, turned away from preconceived theories and composed as his inner spirit moved him. “Tristan” is, therefore, the work of an artist rather than of a theorist, and although it is based on the leit-motif and on certain other important structural ideas which belong to the Wagnerian scheme, it rises far above their limitations and glows with the real light of genius. In “Tristan” the action is suited to the psychology. It is a great work of art and the most beautiful of all recantations. In it we realize how finely means may be adjusted to ends, how clearly music and text may be united, how reasonable is the use of the leit-motif when it characterizes beings aflame with passion; how the song, under the influence of great dramatic situations, can be expanded; how vividly the orchestra can interpret and even further the actions; how even the chorus can be fitted into the dramatic scheme—everywhere in “Tristan” there is unity. This is not true of most of Wagner’s other operas. “Die Meistersinger” comes nearest to “Tristan” in this respect. May we not say that of all the music-dramas of Wagner, “Tristan” and “Die Meistersinger” lay completely in his consciousness unmixed with philosophical ideas and theories? In them the leit-motif deals chiefly with emotions or with characteristics of persons rather than with inanimate objects, or ideas; in them is no grandiose scenic display; no perversity of theory, but only beautiful music wedded to a fitting text.
Wagner’s reforms were bound to bring about a reaction, which came in due season and resulted in shorter and more direct works, such as those of the modern Italians. No operas since Wagner, save Verdi’s “Otello” and “Falstaff,” approach the greatness of his music-dramas, and the tendency of many of these later works has been too much toward what we mildly call “decadence.” But there is a great difference between the truthfulness and artistic validity of “Carmen” and that of “La Bohème” and “La Tosca.” The former is packed full of genuine passion, however primitive, brutal, and devastating it may be; and its technical skill is undoubted.
The most interesting phrase of modern opera is found in the works of the Russians. It was inevitable that they should overturn our delicately adjusted artistic mechanism. Dostoïevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov” is as though there never had been a Meredith or a Henry James, and Moussorgsky’s “Boris Godounov” is as though there had never been a Mozart or a Wagner. It has something of that amorphous quality which seems to be a part of Russian life, but, on the other hand, it has immense vitality. How refreshing to see a crowd of peasants look like peasants, and to hear them sing their own peasant songs; and what stability they give to the whole work! “Boris Godounov” gravitates, as it were, around these folk-songs, which give to it a certain reality and truthfulness.
These various works have long since been accepted by the musical world as the great masterpieces in operatic form. Many of them are practically out of the present repertoire of our opera houses. Were we to assert ourselves—were the general public given an opportunity to choose between good and bad—we should hear them often. And who shall say what results might not come from a small and properly managed opera house, with performances of fine works at reasonable prices?
Opera is controlled by a few rich men who think it a part of the life of a great city that there should be an opera house with a fine orchestra, fine scenery, and the greatest singers obtainable. It does not exist for the good of the whole city, but rather for those of plethoric purses. It does not make any attempt to become a sociological force; it does not even dimly see what possibilities it possesses in that direction. Opera houses and opera companies are sedulously protected against any sociological scrutiny. They are persistently reported to be hot-beds of intrigue; they trade on society and on the love of highly paid singing; they surround themselves with an exotic atmosphere in which the normal person finds difficulty in breathing, and which often turns the opera singer into a strange specimen of the genus man or woman; they go to ruin about once in so often, and are extricated by the unnecessarily rich; they are too little related to the community that supports them save in the mediums of money and social convention.
These artificial and false conditions are bound to bring evils in their train, but these conditions and these evils are chiefly the result of our own complacency. Were opera in any sense domestic; were opera singers to some extent, at least, human beings like ourselves, moving in a reasonable world; did we go to hear opera as we go to a symphony concert, or to an art museum,—to satisfy our love of beauty, and quicken our imagination by contact with beautiful objects; were the conditions of performance such as to enable us to hear the words, then would opera become a fine human institution, then would it take its place among the noble dreams of humanity.
In my endeavor to make some distinctions between good and bad opera I have drawn a somewhat arbitrary line. I do not wish to give the impression that I think all opera on one side of the line is bad and on the other good. I have tried to strike a just balance by applying certain admitted principles of artistic construction and expression. From these principles, which lie at the basis of life and, therefore, of art, opera has unjustly claimed immunity.
And finally we come to that point in our argument where reasoning must stop altogether. For opera is to many people a sort of fascination entirely outside reason. They refuse to admit it as a subject of discussion; they enjoy the spectacle on the stage and the spectacle of which they are a part; the sight of three thousand people well dressed like themselves comforts them; the fine singing, costumes, and stage-setting, the gorgeous orchestra throbbing with passion entirely unbridled—all these they enjoy in that mental lassitude which is dear to them. They are, perhaps, slightly uncomfortable at a symphony concert; here there are no obligations. Opera is, in short, to such people a slightly illicit æsthetic adventure.
In the first chapter I discussed the nature of music itself in order that I might clear away certain popular misconceptions about it and arrive at some estimate of what it really is. In the intervening chapters I have dealt with various phases of music: I have discussed it in connection with words or action, as a sociological force, and as a matter of pedagogy, and in so doing I have had to take into consideration all sorts of non-musical factors. Now the symphony is “pure music,” so called; it exists as a separate and distinct thing whose only purpose is to be beautiful and true to life. Furthermore it has always been largely independent of its audience. The opera has been subject to the vagaries of singers, to the demands of the audience for fine costumes and scenery; the symphony, on the contrary, has grown naturally and freely, being hindered only by the slow development of instruments and of the technique of playing them. Nearly every great symphony has persisted in the face of the opposition of the public and of many of the critics; the gibes hurled at the First Symphony of Brahms were as bitter as those hurled at the Second Symphony of Beethoven. In discussing, therefore, what is undoubtedly the greatest of musical forms, I desire first to state as nearly as may be what, in its essence, it is.
A symphony is, of course, like other music in being an arrangement of rhythmic figures, of melodies (usually called “themes”) and of harmonies. But before describing it as such—before dealing with its materials, its form, its history, and its place in the art of music—I wish to treat it solely as a thing of beauty expressed in terms of sound. Many people seem to think music an art dealing with objects or with ideas. Some, never having become sensitized to it in childhood, look upon it as of no importance whatever. A large number have tried to perform it on an instrument and have failed. Others have succeeded at the price of thinking of it only in terms of technique. A certain happy few, some of whom can perform it, and some of whom cannot, are satisfied to take it as it is and be stimulated by it. These are the true musicians and we should all aspire to join their happy company.
What we call a symphony is merely a series of ordered sounds produced by means of instruments of various kinds. It is sound and nothing else. Our programme books tell us about “first themes” and “second themes,” and we make what effort we can to patch together the various brilliant textures of symphonic music into a coherent pattern, but the music we seek lies behind these outward manifestations as, in a lesser sense, the significance of a great poem lies behind the actual words. So it is with all the greatest art, whatever the medium may be. The chief difference between a symphony and any other form of artistic expression—such as a novel, a play, a painting, or a piece of sculpture—is that a symphony is not a record of something else; it is not a picture of something else; it is itself only. And it is this quality or property of being itself that gives to all pure music its remarkable power. Any intelligent person, on being shown a diagram or plan of a symphonic movement, could be made to understand how and why the material was so disposed, for that disposition is dictated to the composer by the nature of sound and by the limitations and capacities of human beings, and it conforms to certain principles which operate everywhere; but that understanding would not reveal the symphony to him.
There is in every one of us a region of sensibility in which mind and emotion are blended and from which the imagination acts, and it is to this sensibility that music appeals. Now, the imagination, which we believe to be the highest function of human beings, cannot act from the mind alone. Mathematics, for example, does not lie entirely in the domain of the mind, and the same thing may be said of any other department of science. The chief value of scientific studies in school and university lies in the stimulation of the student’s imagination rather than in the acquisition of scientific facts. Now, we cannot conceive any act of the imagination whatever that does not glow with the radiance of emotion, so that music, in appealing to the whole being, is not so completely isolated as is generally supposed. But the simultaneous appeal of music to the mind and the feelings has led to much confusion on the part of writers who have not been sensitive to all its qualities. In his essay on “Education” Herbert Spencer, for example, in discussing the union of science and poetry, says: “It is doubtless true that, as states of consciousness, cognition and emotion tend to exclude each other. And it is doubtless true also that an extreme activity of the feelings tends to deaden the reflective powers: in which sense, indeed, all orders of activity are antagonistic to each other.” Now this statement reveals at once the limitations of a philosophic mind when dealing with something that requires apprehension by the feelings also. In listening to music the reflective powers are not engaged with objects or with definite ideas, but with pure sound that requires correlation only with itself, and the condition of mutual exclusion between thought and feeling no longer exists because the music is expressing thought and feeling in the same terms.[9] Spencer speaks of science as full of poetry, which is true enough, but his statement about music reveals an incapacity to understand it. And his misconceptions about art in general may be illustrated by the following concerning the axis in sculpture as applied to a standing figure: “But sculptors unfamiliar with the theory of equilibrium not uncommonly so represent this attitude that the line of direction falls midway between the feet. Ignorance of the laws of momentum leads to analogous errors; as witness the admired Discobolus, which, as it is posed, must inevitably fall forward the moment the quoit is delivered.” This observation completely misses the quite sound reasons for the pose of that remarkable statue, and, if applied to sculpture in general, would destroy the famous “Victory of Samothrace” and many other fine examples of Greek sculpture.
But it is strange and mysterious, after all, that these ordered sounds should be so precious to us; that we should preserve their printed symbols generation after generation and continually reproduce them as sound, feeling them to be strong and stable and true; that we should even come to say, after many generations, that their creator was a wise man who had in him a profound philosophy. But it is stranger still to realize how convincing this philosophy is as compared to any philosophy of the reason, and to see how profound in it is the sense of reconciliation—a reconciliation that the mind seeks in vain. Our life consists of thought, feeling, and action, phenomena of what we are, and in actual life never quite reconcilable. But the world of music is not actual life. Music is absolved from actual phenomena, and achieves by virtue of this freedom a complete and profound philosophy—a philosophy unintelligible to the mind alone, but intelligible to the complete being. The strength of every art lies chiefly in its detachment from reality. Sculpture does not gain by being realistic, picturesque, or decorative; on the contrary, it is at its highest when it is ideal, detached, and superhuman. Painting does not gain by being categorical, but is greatest when it seeks something beyond the outward, physical view. The novel or the essay depends for its greatness on its power of relating real persons, things, and ideas to that greater and deeper reality of which they are a part. In this sense music stands supreme above the other arts because it is the most detached. The elements of thought and feeling are, in music, presented as elements; the thought is not thought even in the abstract, for it is not “about” anything; the feeling is not actual feeling, and the action is not real action. Each of these properties or states of the human being is here expressed in its essence, detached from all actual manifestation. None but the highest type of mind, none but a heart full of deep human sympathy, none but a vigorous militant spirit could have conceived and brought forth such compositions, for example, as the Third and Ninth Symphonies of Beethoven, yet they are nothing but sound—neither the thought nor the feeling nor the action is real.
But we may also truly say that in Conrad’s novel it is not the person, Lord Jim, who moves us, but rather the author’s deep insight into the elements of human character expressed through the central figure. A portrait by Velasquez is a portrait of the personality that lived within the outward appearance. The figure of Pendennis is not so much the youth by that name as it is youth itself—youth, care-free, but bound by tradition and love. All great art is subjective, lying in the mind of man.
It is from this point of view, then, that I approach the symphony. I do not need now to dwell on its history, on its form, or on its means of expression, because they are merely incidental to its being a profound human document. Pure music at its highest is the will of man made manifest, and one may doubt if that will becomes fully manifest in any other of his creations. It compasses all his actions, all his thoughts, all his feelings; it translates his dreams; it satisfies his insatiable curiosities; it justifies his pride (as he himself never does); it makes him the god he would be; it is like a crystal ball, in whose mystic depths the whole of life moves in a shadow fantasy.
It is obvious, then, that the only possible way to understand a symphony is to accept it as it is and not try to make it into something else. Music is not a language; it does not exist in other terms, but is untranslatable. When a trumpet blares and you make any of the conventional associations with the trumpet, such as a battle, a hunt, a proclamation, a signal, off goes your mind on a stream of alien ideas that may carry you anywhere and that will certainly carry you farther and farther away from the music itself. Each of the orchestral instruments has its own individual association—the oboe reminds you of a shepherd’s pipe, the flute of a bird’s song, the French horn of hunting, and so forth; but each one of the instruments in the orchestra as you listen to it is forming lines, and adding colors, as it were, in a great design. And this design, always complete at any one point, goes on unceasingly forming itself ever and ever anew. It is always complete and always incomplete, always moving onward, always delicately poised for inevitable flight. As you listen you have lived a thousand lives; dream after dream has dissolved itself in your consciousness; each moment has been a perfect and complete existence in itself. When it is finished you awake to what you call happiness or unhappiness, peace or struggle, satisfaction or chagrin; the unreal spectacle of the world imposes itself upon you again; you are once more a human being. Why ask that glorious world in which your nature has been freed and your soul has been disencumbered of your body to assume all the imperfections of this one? The gods, of necessity, dwell in the heavens. No, you cannot understand music by translating it into other terms, or by preserving your associations with the world in which you live. Mind and feeling, sublimated by the magic of these sounds, must detach themselves and rise to a world of pure imagination where there is no locality.
Reconciliation! A philosophy without a category; a religion without a dogma; an indestructible shadow world which offers no explanations, promulgates no opinions, and has no mission—which exists completely in itself. What more shall we ask for? Why cry to the heavens for a manifestation? Why take refuge in a so-called “system” of philosophy? Why shuffle off the whole problem on a dogma? What comfort to a squirrel in a cage to know the number of its bars? Is our slow and inevitable progress from the unknown to the unknown any more significant because we have learned to tell our beads, intellectual, religious, or æsthetic, to mumble our little formulæ, and to pick our way, eyes downward, amongst the stones and thorns, never once glancing clear-eyed upward to the sun? We have always sought a fourth dimension, and have always had it. We want what we have not; we wish to be what we are not; and all the time they have been within our grasp. We make a far away heaven to answer this universal cry, when our hand is on its very doorlatch. Our imagination falters most when we apply it to things nearest us. Where can heaven be if not here? Is it an omnibus in which you may secure a comfortable seat by paying your fare? Or is it a state of yourself toward which you continually struggle and to which you occasionally attain?
This, then, is my thesis. A symphony is not merely an arrangement of rhythms, melodies, and harmonies; it is not a record of the thoughts, feelings, and deeds of men; it is not a picture of man or of nature. Rather does it launch itself from these into the unknown. It is pure imagination freed from the actual.
The foregoing does not, in any sense, preclude that idea of a symphony which is expressible in terms of rhythm, melody, and harmony. What I have said has been said for the purpose of preventing a conception of it in these terms only (and, of course, in still lower terms). Our physical hearing is a transit to the imagination and we want the physical hearing to serve that purpose. Nothing retards it more than an attempt at the time to intellectualize the process. In other words, listening to a symphony should consist in giving yourself freely to it; in making of yourself a passive medium. Your study of the arrangement of themes, and so forth, should precede or follow the actual experience. And if you have no leisure or opportunity for such study and depend entirely on an occasional concert, you should nevertheless continue to pursue the same inactivity, allowing the music itself to increase your susceptibility little by little. If the mind is employed in an attempt to extricate order from confusion, it usurps for the moment the other functions of listening. And I would go so far as to say that the proper goal of a musical education should be to arrive at such a state of impressionability to pure music as would leave the mind, the feelings, and the imagination free to act subconsciously without active direction, and without struggle. The matter is so obvious. There is the music; here is the person. It awaits him. It was created of him and for him. It is inconceivable without him. It is his spirit coming back to him purified. It is the only thing he cannot sully, and which cannot sully him, for in the very nature of it, it cannot be turned to base uses. What man would be, here he is. In making this beautiful spectacle of life, as Conrad says, he has found its only explanation. So we should avoid marring the actual experience by conscious intent on the technical details.
What I have said thus far may seem of but slight assistance to the average person who attends symphony concerts. I have stated what I thought symphonic music to be, and have urged my readers not to listen to it analytically. But my purpose here is not to attempt to blaze an easy path for the music-lover; in fact, I am unqualifiedly opposed to that too common practice of æsthetic writing. There is no easy path, and an attempt to find one is disastrous to any progress whatever. Every person who has attained to a real understanding of æsthetic objects knows that the growth of that understanding has been slow. The characteristic weakness of our artistic status is self-deception. We are not frank with ourselves; we are unwilling to admit ourselves in ignorance; we advance opinions which are not our own. The only possible basis for advancement in anything is intellectual honesty. Information about a symphony is useless unless there is a real appeal in the music itself. So I do not attempt to provide here a panacea; just the opposite is my purpose. All I want to do is to show that the symphony is worth struggling for, and to brush away such misconceptions about it as might retard the progress of those who have the will and the perseverance to struggle. And when there is no will to struggle, nothing can be accomplished. What is called “mental lassitude” is almost a contradiction in terms.
It is obvious that a proper musical education would have solved our problems in a natural manner. If, as children, we had been taught to sing only beautiful songs; if we had been trained to listen to music; if our memory for musical phrases, rhythms, etc., had been cultivated, we should be quick in apprehending all the qualities of a symphony, for all our analytical reasoning would have been done beforehand. And nothing can ever take the place of such an education, because the natural taste for music, which is so strong in childhood, has in us been allowed to lapse. So that our first duty is to our children. We want them to avoid our mistakes. In every household, in every school, public or private, this ideal of music-study should be upheld—namely, that the children should enter life so prepared by their early training as to be able to enjoy the greatest music.
I take a form of pure music as a type of our highest attainment, because when music is allied to words or to action it gives certain hostages. Furthermore, the symphony evolved slowly under the law of its own being, and it represents the application to music of those general laws of proportion and balance, of unity and variety, which govern all artistic expression. It has never been subjected to alien influences; popularity has not been its motive power; virtuosity has never dictated to it. If you understand the symphony you can apply that understanding to any other form of music. If one compares it with the opera this distinction is at once evident. In the opera that antagonism of which Spencer speaks between states of feeling and of cognition does exist, because the mind is there appealed to through objects rather than through pure sound. The symphony speaks in its own terms; opera speaks in terms of characters in action, of costume and of scenery, as well as of music. Even the greatest operas cause you to reflect on something outside themselves—on human motives as they find expression in human action. In either “Don Giovanni” or “Tristan,” although the music reaches great heights of beauty and is profoundly moving, there is the inevitable struggle between seeing and hearing, the inevitable difficulty between a simultaneous state of cognition and of feeling. The symphony entirely escapes this dilemma. Np doubt great motives lie beneath it; no doubt it, too, is a drama of human life, for otherwise it could not be great as a work of art; but the play of motives in a symphony is hidden behind the impenetrable veil of sound. The Third, Fifth, and Ninth Symphonies of Beethoven are truly dramatic, but only in this sense. They range from the tender to the terrible; they have their own emotional climaxes; they philosophize, they brood, they grin like a comic mask; action and reaction follow each other as in life itself; nothing is lacking but that one inconsequential thing, reality. Art is truth; life is but a shadow fading to nothingness as the sun sets.
I have said that the symphony evolved slowly under the laws of its own being, and I wish to state briefly and (as far as possible) in simple terms how that evolution came about. If I should go back to the very beginning I should have to point out that the primal difference between music and noise consists in the intensity of vibration and in the grouping of the sounds into regular series by means of accents. A series of unaccented tones does not make music. If a clock, in striking twelve, should, by accenting certain strokes, throw the whole number into regular groups, it would supply the basis for music. In any great piece of martial music these accents and these impulses in groups constitute the element that moves us to comply with it ourselves; we beat time with hand or foot; we are infused with the momentum. And the force of the impetus may be observed at the close of nearly every piece of music where conventional chords ease off its stress. The last forty measures of the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven constitute a sort of brake on the huge moving mass. Chopin’s Polonaise, opus 26, number 1, on the contrary, does not end; it stops. In Fielding’s “Tom Jones” the impetus of the action is carried on so far that the climax is postponed to a point dangerously near the end of the book, which leaves us with a sense of breathlessness or even of aggravation. In music, when this impetus is of extreme vigor, any temporary displacement of it produces almost the effect of a cataclysm—as in the first movement of Beethoven’s Third Symphony, where great chords in twos clash across already established metrical groups of threes. Within the metrical groups all sorts of subdivisions may exist, and these constitute what is called “rhythm” in music. Rhythm, in brief, is the variety which any melody imposes on the regular beats that constitute its time basis.
It is from this rhythmic movement that the symphony gets its quality of action, and the precursors of the symphony in this respect were the old folk-songs and dance-tunes the melodies of which are full of rhythmic diversity. The line from these early naïve compositions down to symphonic music was never broken, and there is hardly a symphony in existence that does not pay direct tribute to them.
I dwell on this point at some length because here lies a large part of the energy of music. The rhythmic figures to which I have already referred contain within themselves a primal force. They are capable of throwing off parts of themselves, and these, caught in the primary orbit, live as separate identities, until the too powerful attraction of the greater mass absorbs them again. As rhythm, then, a symphonic movement is like sublimated physical energy. As the first oscillations of its impulse strike our consciousness we are caught up into a world of movement which has the inevitability of star courses. We ourselves are all rhythm—rhythm imprisoned and awaiting release. In music we become one with all that ceaseless movement or vibration without which there would be no physical or spiritual world at all. I say, then, that rhythm is the very heart of music; that while we are all susceptible to it (though comparatively few people can move their hands or feet or bodies in perfect rhythm—they would be much better off if they could!) we do not altogether see what significance it has as an æsthetic property of music. When the heart of music stops beating (as in one of Beethoven’s scherzi) we are surprised, or perhaps disturbed, not answering to the marvelous silence; when two or even three rhythms are acting simultaneously we are confused and helpless before the most fascinating of æsthetic phenomena.
Let me next dwell briefly on that element in the evolution of symphonic music which consists in the use of several themes simultaneously. Should we trace this back to its original we should find ourselves in the ninth century. Now, while I know that this is not the place for a dissertation on any abstruse musical terms, I shall venture this much, not only because this method of writing is used in nearly all really fine music, but because a large part of the pleasure to be derived from listening to a symphony depends on our capacity to follow the varied strands of melody that constitute it. Is it not so, also, with the novel? The chief theme of Meredith’s “The Egoist” has numberless counter-themes running through and around it. It is not by any means to be found in Sir Willoughby alone, for you understand it through Vernon’s good sense, through Clara’s dart-like intuitions, through Mr. Middleton’s patient surprise at having such a daughter, through Letitia, and Crossjay, and Horace De Cray—all these are continually explaining and illuminating the theme for you. It is true that music asks you to listen to several melodies at once, but what does the episode of Crossjay’s unwitting listening to Sir Willoughby’s belated declaration to Letitia ask you to do? Is it enough merely to record the scene as it is unfolded to you? Or do you remember Crossjay’s father stumping up the avenue in his ill-fitting clothes? Clara’s intercessions for Crossjay? Vernon’s attempts to adjust himself to Sir Willoughby’s overbearing grandiloquence? And do you not have to remember, especially, that Crossjay had been locked out of his room by Sir Willoughby and had sought the ottoman as a refuge? These are all strands of the chief melody in that remarkable composition. (Not all the strands are there, for satire never tells the whole truth. “Tony” in Ethel Sidgwick’s “Promise” and “Succession” is also an egoist.) A novel, then, in this sense, is not successive, but simultaneous. All that has been and all that is to be exist in every moment of life, for that is all what we call “the present” means. The chief difference between such play of character around an idea and the movement of many musical themes around a central one lies in the detached and spiritualized quality of sound.
It is obvious that music, written for an orchestra containing some twenty or more different kinds of instruments and scores of performers, must have great variety of expression. Each instrument has its own tone color, its own range, and its own technique, and each must be given its own thing to say. In this sense symphonic music is an intricate mesh of melodies, each intent on its own purpose, each a part of the whole. In no other of its varied means of expression is the symphony more strictly and more fully an evolution than in this one of complex melodic textures. There has been no hiatus. From its first great moment of perfection in the time of Palestrina, through the madrigal and fugue, through dance-tunes conventionalized in the suite, through organ pieces, oratorios, and the like, this method of writing has persisted. Wagner bases his whole musical structure on the play and interplay of melodic lines in his leit-motifs. Bach is all melodic texture. Music written in this manner is called “polyphonic,” and the method of writing it is called “counterpoint.”
In direct contrast to this is “monodic” music which employs only one melody against an accompaniment of chords. A large part of the music we hear is monodic; an aria by Puccini, a popular song, most church music—these have one melody only. So has Poe’s “For Annie.” Polyphonic music has the great advantage of being intensive in its expression; it evolves out of itself. When I say that almost the whole of the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is evolved out of a few measures near the beginning, I mean that the melodic fragments of the theme take on a life of their own and by so doing illustrate and expound the significance of the original thesis from which they sprang. This quality, or property in music, upon which I have laid some stress, is, then, not so much a matter of technique as of æsthetics. The thing done and the manner of doing it is each the result of general laws, and I venture to dwell on them here, not for expert, technical reasons, but because I wish to offer the listener to symphonies one of his most delightful opportunities. Note should finally be made of the important fact that only those symphonic themes which have a varied and vibrant rhythm serve well the purpose of counterpoint, for the essence of instrumental counterpoint lies in setting against each other two or more melodic phrases in contrasting rhythms.
I do not mean to imply by the foregoing that symphonic music persistently employs counterpoint as against simple melody. There are whole passages in the symphonies of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven where one tune is given out against an accompaniment of chords, and a lyric composer like Schubert employs counterpoint somewhat rarely. But in the greatest symphonies the predominating method of expression is through polyphony.
In writing about counterpoint I have dwelt on the rhythmic quality in melody, and have stated that a well-defined and varied rhythm is essential to contrapuntal treatment. I might almost have said that all good melody depends on rhythm. I do say—expecting many a silent protest from certain of my readers—that all the greatest melodies have a finely adjusted rhythm, and I apply this statement to all melody from the folk-song to the present time. I might enumerate beautiful melodies whose effect depends on other properties than rhythm,—as the second melody in Chopin’s Nocturne in G major, opus 37, number 2,—but I should add that, as melody, existing by itself, it is not fine and the reason is that its rhythm is monotonous.[10] And when I say it is not fine, I mean that it is not highly imaginative, and that it depends too much on its harmonization. And when, in turn, I say that, I mean, perforce, that it is too emotional. The difference between such a theme and one with a really fine rhythm is the difference between Poe’s “The Raven” and Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” In the former the mind is being continually lulled by the soft undulation of the rhythms and rhymes; in the latter the mind is being continually stimulated by their complexities. Yet Keats’s ode is as unified as Poe’s lyric. There are melodies for songs for the pianoforte, for the violin, and for the orchestra; there are sonata melodies and there are symphonic melodies just as there is a shape for a hatchet and a shape for a pair of scissors—which is only stating once again the old law that the style must suit the medium of expression, or that the shape must suit the uses to which a thing is put. Symphonic themes, in contradistinction to themes for songs or short pianoforte pieces, or dances, should be inconclusive; they are valuable for what they presage rather than for what they state, and they should indicate their own destiny. The four notes with which the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven begins are so,—in fact the whole theme is valueless by itself,—but they contain enough pent-up energy to vitalize not only the first movement, but the three which follow it. If it were possible for each reader of these words to hear—as an interlude to his reading—a series of great symphonic melodies, and if he would listen to them carefully, he would find almost every one to contain a finely adjusted rhythm.
Symphonic themes present certain difficulties to the listener whose understanding of melody is limited to a square-cut strophic tune. He is accustomed to a certain musical punctuation—a comma (so to speak) after the first and third lines of the music, a semicolon after the second, and a period at the end. And when he gets an extra period thrown in (as he does after the third line of the tune “America”) he is all the happier. When he hears the opening theme of the “Eroica” Symphony break in two in the middle and fall apart, he gets discouraged, for his musical imagination has not been sufficiently developed to see that that very breaking apart presages the tragic turmoil of the whole movement. When Brahms gives out, in the opening measures of his Third Symphony, two themes at once, he does not fathom the element of strife which is involved, and so cannot follow its progress to the final triumph of one of them.
But the symphony contains everything, and there is a place in it for lyric melody, provided the flight be long and sweeping. The “slow movement” of a symphony contains such themes, but they are not content to be merely fine melodies. They, too, must contain some potentiality which is afterwards realized. The best and most familiar example will be found in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, where the first rhythmic unit (contained in the first three notes) of the beautiful romantic theme detaches itself and pursues an almost scandalous existence full of delicate pranks and grimaces, and comic quips and turns, now gentle, now ironic, now pretending to be sentimental, until it finally rejoins the theme again. This piece is a romance touched with comedy—a romance great enough to suffer all the by-play without the least dilution of its quality.
Any attempt in a book like this to explain the intricacies of harmonic development as it is seen in the symphony must be inconclusive. Harmony is, in itself, less tangible than either rhythm or melody, for it lacks to a considerable extent the element of continuity. I mean by this that groups of harmonies do not possess coherence in relation to each other. They do not stay in the memory as a line of melody does; the impression we get from them is fleeting. It may touch with light or shade one brief moment in a piece of music (as it frequently does in Schubert’s compositions); it may produce a bewildering riot of color (as in ultra-modern music); or it may cover the whole piece with a subdued shadow (as in the slow movement of Franck’s quintette). But the real office of harmony is to serve melody. I mean by this that when two or more melodies sound together they make harmony at every point of contact, and this harmony, incidental to the movement of melodic parts, has a reality which chords by themselves cannot acquire. And the whole justification for many of the sounds in ultra-modern music lies in this one perfectly correct theory. Not that the laws must not be obeyed—as they frequently are not; not that a composer may violate nature, and do what he likes. He must, as of old, justify in reason all the dissonances arising from his melodic adventures. He should remember Bach, whose melodies clash in never-to-be-forgotten stridence, striking forth such flashes of strange beauty as can only come from a war of themes.
The symphony is, then, an arrangement of rhythms, melodies, and harmonies. Each of these three elements has a life of its own,—the rhythms, taken altogether, have their own coherence, the melodies theirs, and the harmonies theirs,—but each belongs to the whole. The rhythm of Poe’s “For Annie” would be an impossible rhythm with which to carry forward the purposes of any part of “The Ring and the Book.” Equally useless would be the rhythms of Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony to carry forward the purposes of Beethoven’s Ninth. The whole structure of Poe’s poem would disintegrate if one single word fell out of place; so would the fabric of a Schubert melody were a note destroyed.
In every direction, wherever we look, this cohesion of all objects in themselves, this blending of all objects into a greater body, reveals itself. This is the basis of all religious belief, of a novel, of the composition of a picture, or of life itself. To say that a symphony is made up of separate elements, that each of these elements has a life of its own, and that they all unite in a common purpose, is to state a truism. And to suppose that a symphony can be understood without an understanding of all its elements is to suppose an absurdity.