Musical Studies

by Ernest Newman

IX

This brings us to a second point. We are often told that programme music is all right if it is so conceived and so handled that it suffices as pure music, whether we know the programme or not. And as this seems to many people like a fair compromise, and as programme-musicians have been ill-treated so long that some of them are positively thrilled with gratitude now for not being kicked, there is a tendency to accept this quasi-solution of the problem as something like the final one. The programmist is willing to admit that a number of themes, no matter how agreeable, do not constitute symphonic music unless they have some emotional connection and some logical musical development; while the absolutist graciously allows that a concrete subject may be the basis of a symphony, if only the music is of such a kind that it will appeal to the hearer just as much, although he may not know what the subject is.

It is precisely against this compromise that I think we ought to protest, for it seems to me to be based on a complete misunderstanding of the natures of absolute and of programme music. Not only does it ignore the difference in intellectual origin between a phrase such as that which opens the finale of the Jupiter symphony, and such a one as that which symbolises Till Eulenspiegel, but it overlooks the fact that along with this difference in the thing expressed there must necessarily go a difference in the manner of expressing it. It is impossible to subscribe to the insidious compromise that programme music ought to "speak for itself," without a knowledge of the programme being necessary. [32] We not only need the programme—the statement of the literary or pictorial subject of the composition—but this is at once answerable for half our pleasure and a justification of certain peculiarities of form which the music may now safely assume. If the shape and colour of the themes of a piece of music, the order of their occurrence, and the variations they undergo, are all determined by the composer having a certain picture in his mind, it is surely necessary for us to be told what that picture is. If it was necessary for him when he was composing, it is necessary for us if we are to listen to the music as he meant us to listen to it. To put a symphonic poem before us without telling us all the composer's intentions in it, is as foolish as to make us listen to the music of a song or an opera without hearing the words. In the opera and the song, things go this way or that because the poetic purpose requires it, and the justification of them is precisely their appropriateness to the poetic purpose. Similarly, things go this way or that in the symphonic poem because the poetic purpose requires it; and here also we require to know what that poetic purpose was before we can justify or condemn what the musician has done. Let us examine a simple case, say the Romeo and Juliet overture of Tchaikovski, and see whether this particular work could be equally understood and appreciated, as pure music, by the man who knows and the man who does not know the programme.

There is not the slightest doubt that the Romeo and Juliet would give intense pleasure to any one who simply walked unpremeditatedly into a concert room and heard the overture without knowing that it had a poetical basis—who listened to it, that is, as a piece of music pure and simple in sonata form. But I emphatically deny that this hearer would receive as much pleasure from the work as I do, for example, knowing the poetic story to which it is written. He might think the passage for muted strings, for example, extremely beautiful, but he would not get from it such delight as I, who not only feel all the musical loveliness of the melody and the harmonies and the tone colour, but see the lovers on the balcony and breathe the very atmosphere of Shakespeare's scene. I am richer than my fellow by two or three emotions in a case of this kind. My nature is stirred on two or three sides instead of only one. I would go further, and say that not only does the auditor I have supposed get less pleasure from the work than I, but he really does not hear Tchaikovski's work at all. If the musician writes music to a play and invents phrases to symbolise the characters and to picture the events of the play, we are simply not listening to his work at all if we listen to it in ignorance of his poetical scheme. We may hear the music, but it is not the music he meant us to hear, or at all events not heard as he intended us to hear it. If melody, harmony, colour and development are all shaped and directed by certain pictures in the musician's mind, we get no further than the mere outside of the music, unless we also are familiar with those pictures. Let us take another example. The reader will remember that the overture opens with a religioso theme, in the clarinets and bassoons, that is intended to suggest Friar Lawrence. In the ensuing scenes of conflict between the two opposing factions, this theme appears every now and then in the brass, sometimes in a particularly forceful and assertive manner. The casual hearer whom I have supposed would probably look upon this simply as a matter of counterpoint; Tchaikovski has invented two themes, he would say, and is now simply combining them. But here again he would be wrong. These passages certainly give us musical pleasure, and are as certainly meant to do so, but they are intended also to do something more. The reappearance of the "Friar Lawrence" theme has a dramatic as well as a musical significance. Taken as it is from the placid wood-wind and given to the commanding brass, and made to stand out like a warning voice through the mad riot that is going on all round it, it tells its own tale at once to any one with a knowledge of the subject of the overture. So again with the mournful transformation of the love motive at the end of the overture. Tchaikovski does not alter the melody and the harmony in this way for merely musical reasons. He has something more in his mind than an appeal to the abstract musical faculty; and I repeat that the hearer who is ignorant of this something more not only gets less than the full amount of pleasure from the work, but really does not hear the work as Tchaikovski conceived and wrote it, and intended it to be heard. The same argument holds good of the song. Imagine one of the most highly and subtly expressive of modern songs—say the "O wüsst' ich doch" or the Feldeinsamkeit of Brahms—sung to you at a concert without your having the slightest knowledge of the words. Some pleasure, of course, you could not help feeling in the music; but it would be nothing compared with the sensations you would have if you knew the words or could follow them in a programme. Then you would find not only that certain passages that seemed to you the least interesting before, as mere music, are poignantly expressive, but these apparent peculiarities are justified, and indeed necessitated, by the poetry. Now imagine that you hear the same song three months later. You have forgotten the actual words point by point; but you still retain the recollection of the emotional moods they suggested; and so you are still responsive to each nuance of expression in the music. Listening to a song under these conditions is precisely the same as listening to a symphonic poem. In Die Ideale, for example, Liszt divides Schiller's poem into sections of different intensity or different timbre of feeling, and places each of these in the score before the section of the music that illustrates it. Die Ideale is, in fact, an extension of the song-form, in which the words are not sung but are either suggested to us or supposed to be known to us. But it is folly to suppose that either in the Brahms song or Die Ideale the man who does not know the literary basis can get the same pleasure as the man who does.

We have only to treat all other symphonic poems in the same way as we have just treated Tchaikovski's Romeo and Juliet—to ask ourselves what the composer meant us to hear, and how much of it we really do hear if we do not know his poetical scheme—to see the folly of holding up absolute music as the standard to which programme music ought to conform. Occasionally, however, the objection is put in the inverse way, and we are told that programme music is absurd because it does not speak intelligibly to us, does not carry its story written upon it so plainly that no one can mistake it. The charge of absurdity must be really laid at the door of the composer. The plain truth is that a composer has no right to put before us a symphonic poem without giving us the fullest guide to his literary plans. It would be ridiculous of Wagner or Schubert to think their business was ended when they had simply given their music the title of, say, The Ring of the Nibelung or The Erl-king; it is equally ridiculous of Strauss to call a work Till Eulenspiegel or Don Juan, and leave us to discover the rest for ourselves. If Strauss, for example, put together the Don Juan theme (the one on the four horns) in that particular order not merely because he liked the sequence of sounds, but because they accurately limned the picture of Don Juan which he had in his eye at that moment, it is folly of him to throw it before us as a mere self-existent sequence of sounds, and not to tell us what aspect of Don Juan it is meant to represent.

As for "the inherent stupidity of programme music"—to which opinion one critic was led by having, in the innocence of his heart, thought the motive just mentioned signified one thing, while, he afterwards discovered, it signified quite another—I would put it to him that he is never likely to go wrong again over this phrase, and that each time he hears Don Juan he will, to this extent, be nearer seeing what the composer meant him to see than he ever was before. And if he had an equal certainty of the meaning of all the other subjects in Don Juan, would he not then be able to recreate the whole thing in accordance with Strauss' own ideas? And would not all difficulty then vanish, and the "inherent stupidity" seem to be in those who cursed the form because they had not the key to the idea? Let any one listen to Till Eulenspiegel with no more knowledge of the composer's intentions than is given in the title, and I can understand him failing to make head or tail of it. But let him learn by heart the admirable German or English analyses that can now be had in almost any programme-book, and if all does not then become as clear to him as crystal, if then he cannot follow all the gradations of that magical piece of story-telling—well, one can only say that nature has deprived him of the symphonic-poem faculty, just as she makes some people insensitive to Botticelli or Maeterlinck. He does but throw an interesting light on his own psychology; the value of the musical form remains unassailed.

Now why does not Strauss, or any other composer of programme music, spare himself and us all this trouble by showing us, once for all, the main psychological lines upon which he has built his work? The composer himself, in fact, is the cause of all the misunderstanding and all the æsthetic confusion. Nothing could be clearer than the symbolism of the music in Strauss' Don Quixote, when you know the precise intention of each variation; but the fact that Strauss should give the clue to these in the piano duet and omit it all from the full score shows how absurdly lax and inconsistent the practice of these gentlemen is. Also sprach Zarathustra, again, is quite clear, because indications are given here and there of the precise part of Nietzsche's book with which the musician is dealing; while Ein Heldenleben, in the absence of an official "Guide," simply worries us by prompting futile conjectures as to the meaning of this or that phrase. Wagner would not have dreamt of throwing a long work before us, and simply telling us that the subject of it was Parsifal. Why, then, should the writer of symphonic poems expect us to fathom all his intentions when he has merely printed the title of his work? If the words of the opera are necessary for me to understand what was in Wagner's mind when he wrote this or that motive, surely words—not accompanying the music, but prefixed to it—are needful to tell me what was in Strauss' mind when he shaped the violin solo in Ein Heldenleben. If it is absurd to play to me a song without giving me a copy of the words, expecting me to understand the music that has been born of a poetical idea as if it had been written independently of any verbal suggestion, it is equally absurd to put before me, as pure music, an orchestral piece that was never conceived as pure music. If the poem or the picture was necessary to the composer's imagination, it is necessary to mine; if it is not necessary to either of us, he has no right to affix the title of it to his work.

It is curious, again, that people who can defend Wagner as against the absolutists cannot also see that they are implicitly justifying Strauss and his fellows. Thus another critic writes that "Wagner saw that the intellectual idea could not be conveyed by music alone; that together with the colour—the music—must go the spoken word to make clear what was meant." So far, good. But then he quarrels with Strauss for trying to make his themes expressive of something more than music pure and simple, and giving us a programme to help us. Why, where in the name of lucidity is the difference between singing to a phrase of music the words that prompted it, and printing these words alongside the phrase or at the beginning of the score? Does it matter whether the composer writes a love-scene and has the actual words sung by a tenor and a soprano, or merely puts the whole thing on an orchestra, and tells us that this is a scene between two lovers, and that their love is of such and such a quality? For the life of me I cannot see why the one proceeding is right and the other wrong. And once more, if it is essential that we should not be left in the slightest doubt in the case of the opera as to who the protagonists are and what is the nature of their sentiments, it is equally essential, in the case of the symphonic poem, that we should not be left in ignorance of any of the points that have gone to make the structure of the music what it is. No symphonic poem ought to be published or performed without the fullest analysis of it by the composer himself, just as he would never think of publishing the music of his song or his opera without the words. There is no compromise possible. If the song and the opera are legitimate blends of literary ideas and musical expression, so is the symphonic poem, and if the literary basis has to be given us in full in the case of the opera, we equally need it in the other case as completely as it can be set before us. The great trouble is that composers like Strauss so often do neither the one thing nor the other; they neither put their work before us as music pure and simple, nor give us sufficient clue to what the representative music is intended to represent.

And now let me try to show briefly that Wagner misunderstood the meaning of his own reforms, and that the ideal poetic art-form after which he was striving was not the opera but the symphonic poem.