V

Without making too wide a digression into the æsthetics of music, we can see that the tendency to write the one kind of music is as deeply rooted in us as the tendency to write the other kind. Some musicians, by constitutional bias, take the one route, some the other; but neither party has the right to assume that the kind of music it prefers is the only kind. Hence it is an error to say that music is stepping out of her own province when she becomes programme music. Her real province includes both absolute and programme music; the one is as inherent in us as the other.

But for reasons that will become apparent later, the absolute branch of the art developed more rapidly than the poetical branch. Even by the time absolute music had come to its magnificent climax in Beethoven, programme music had really done nothing at all of any permanent value. Many composers seemed to have a vague idea that purely instrumental music could be made to convey suggestions of real life just as poetry does, and just as the song does; but they had not yet learned where to begin and where to end, what was worth doing in this line and what was not worth doing. Their attempts at programme music were mostly crude imitations of external things, in a language not yet rich enough to express what they wanted to say; they contain, for our ears, rather too much programme and rather too little music. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the minds of the men who tried to write poetic music for instruments alone, ran in two main directions. They either wrote pieces musically interesting in themselves, and gave them fanciful titles, such as "Diana in the wood," "The virtuous coquette," "Juno, or the jealous woman," and so on, or they frankly began with the intention of representing appearances and events in music. Thus in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book we have pieces with the titles, "Faire wether," "Calm wether," "Lightening," "Thunder," and "A clear day." These things were not confined to one country; they are met with all over Europe. Occasionally the programme writers worked through vocal as well as instrumental forms. Muffat wrote pieces of the "Diana in the wood" order. Jannequin described the battle of Malegnano in music, Hermann the battle of Pavia. In the seventeenth century Carlo Farina wrote orchestral pieces in which the voices of animals were imitated. Buxtehude wrote seven klavier-suites, describing in music the nature and quality of the seven planets. Frescobaldi did a battle capriccio. Frohberger wrote a suite showing the Emperor Ferdinand IV. making his way up into heaven along Jacob's ladder. Frohberger, indeed, was realistic beyond the average. He not only painted nature, for example, but indicated the locality as accurately as a geography or a guide-book could do; and it was not merely humanity in general that moved about among his scenes, but the Count this or the Prince that. In some suites, that are unfortunately lost to an admiring world, he painted a storm on the Dover-Calais route, and gave a series of pictures of what befell the Count von Thurn in a perilous journey down the Rhine. [25]

All this seems very crude now, but the very prevalence of the practice points to a widespread feeling in those times that music could be made to serve as an art of representation. Indeed, a much earlier example of this tendency can be quoted, showing that even the ancient Greeks had their programme-music writers. There is a passage in the Geography of Strabo, in which he describes what he heard at Delphi. Here, he says, they had a musical contest "of players on the cithara, who executed a pæan in honour of Apollo. The players on the cithara were accompanied by players on the flute, and by citharists, who performed without singing. They performed a melos (strain) called the Pythian mood. It consisted of five parts—the anacrusis, the ampeira, cataceleusmus, iambics and dactyls, and pipes. Timosthenes, the commander of the fleet of the second Ptolemy, and who was the author of a work in ten books on Harbours, composed a melos. His object was to celebrate in this melos the contest of Apollo with the serpent Python. The anacrusis was intended to express the prelude; the ampeira, the first onset of the contest; the cataceleusmus, the contest itself; the iambics and dactyls denoted the triumphal strain on obtaining the victory, together with musical measures of which the dactyl is peculiarly appropriated to praise and the iambics to insult and reproach; the syrinxes and pipes described the death, the players imitating the hissings of the expiring monster." [26] The unsympathetic may say it is to be hoped that the gentleman was a better admiral than he seems to have been a musician.

But to get back to modern Europe again. These crude imitations of birds and beasts and the rolling of the waves are not programme music; they are the rawest part of the raw material out of which programme music is made. The difficulty is to make the piece interesting both as music, and as a representation of what it purports to describe. A composer may fling a phrase before us and tell us this represents Hamlet, or Othello, or a death-rattle, or the Israelites crossing the Red Sea, or anything else he likes; but unless the phrase has an interest of its own, and unless he can satisfy our musical as well as our literary sense by the way he handles and combines and transforms it in the sequel, he will not arrest our attention. The great problem, indeed, of both the modern symphonic poem and the modern opera is to tell a story adequately and at the same time to satisfy our desire for interesting musical development. If the composer fixes his attention too exclusively on the literary part of his subject, his work will lack organic musical unity; if he is too intent on achieving this, he will probably fail in dramatic definiteness. This, I shall soon try to show, is really the crux both of opera and of programme music; and if we rarely succeed in solving so knotty a problem, it is not to be wondered at that the solution did not come to the men of the sixteenth or seventeenth or eighteenth century.

As a matter of fact, however, one old composer did try to effect a union of the programme purpose with some real sense of musical form. This was Johann Kuhnau (1660?-1722), who, in his six Bible Sonatas, describes "the fight between David and Goliath," "the melancholy of Saul being dissipated by music," "the marriage of Jacob," and so on. Kuhnau was a really remarkable man. He was a good musician who could write interesting clavier-pieces apart from any programme scheme. He was moreover a keen-witted man who tried to think out seriously the problem of the union of musical expression and poetical purpose, so far as any man in those days could do so. In the preface to the Bible Sonatas he points out that the musician, like the poet, prose-writer, and painter, often wants to turn his hearers thoughts in a particular direction. If he wants to express in his music not merely sadness but the sadness of this or that individual—to distinguish, as he says, a sad Hezekiah from a weeping Peter or a lamenting Jeremiah—he must employ words in order to make the emotion definite. But not necessarily, be it observed, by writing the music to the words, as in a song. His own plan is to illustrate his subject in music, and make his poetic purpose clear to us by giving a detailed verbal account of it. Thus he prefaces each of his Bible Sonatas with an elaborate account of the event it deals with, and then summarises the main motives. This, for example, is the summary of the first Sonata, after a long general introduction. The Sonata expresses, he says—

  1. The stamping and bravado of Goliath.
  2. The trembling of the Israelites, and their prayer to God at sight of their awful enemy.
  3. The courage of David, his desire to break the proud spirit of the giant, and his childlike trust in God's help.
  4. The contest of words between David and Goliath, and the contest itself, in which Goliath is wounded in the forehead by the stone, falls down, and is slain.
  5. The flight of the Philistines, and how they are pursued by the Israelites, and slaughtered with the sword.
  6. The jubilation of the Israelites over the victory.
  7. The chorus of the women in praise of David.
  8. And, finally, the general joy, finding vent in vigorous dancing and leaping.

It will be seen at once that the programme here is of a different kind from those of some of Kuhnau's predecessors and contemporaries. It does indeed aim at representing some external things—such as the stamping of Goliath, the impact of the stone against his head, and so on—but they are not inherently absurd or impossible; while he gives a great deal of his space to the really emotional moments of the story. Throughout the sonatas, however, it is the poetic purpose that directs the music, determining both expression, sequence, and form. Every episode that occurs in the story has to be represented in the music; and Kuhnau is careful to print, in his score, the verbal indication at the precise point where the music follows it. He tells us the exact bar at which the stone is aimed at Goliath, and the bar in which the giant falls down; where Laban begins to practise his deceit on Jacob, where Jacob is "amorous and contented," and where "his heart warns him that something is wrong"; and so on—thereby setting an example to composers like Strauss, who foolishly give the purchaser of such a score as Till Eulenspiegel no guide to the various adventures of the hero. Some of Kuhnau's devices provoke a smile, as in the Fifth Sonata—"Gideon, the Saviour of the People of Israel." The sign to Gideon was that the fleece was to be wet with dew, but the ground dry; the next night the ground was to be wet and the fleece dry. Kuhnau naïvely expresses the second sign by giving the theme of the first sign in contrary motion. But all naïvetés apart, a great deal of the music of the Sonatas is very fine; and it is noteworthy that Kuhnau points out, in his general preface, that the writer of programme music must be allowed more liberty than the absolutist to break a traditional "law" when the expression demands it. [27] Kuhnau, indeed, was on the right path. He was a man born before his due time; had he lived in our days, and had at his command all the resources of modern expression and our enormous orchestras, he might have taken up very much the same position towards music as the modern programmists.

John Sebastian Bach, who succeeded Kuhnau at the Thomas Church in Leipzig, made one, and only one, experiment in the same line. This was the "Capriccio on the departure of my dearly beloved brother." The first movement, he says, depicts "The cajoleries of friends, trying to induce him to give up the idea of the journey"; the second is "a representation of the various things that may happen to him in foreign lands"; the third gives utterance to a "general lament of his friends as they say good-bye to him"; and the finale is a fugue on the postillion's signal.

Bach, however, made no further attempt to develop along these lines. The work he had been sent into the world to do was of another order.

About the same time Couperin, in France, was cultivating the programme genre with some success. He not only wrote harmless little things with titles like "La Galante," but also connected pieces of musical delineation, such as "The Pilgrims." Like Kuhnau, he justified his principles in a preface. "In the composition of my pieces," he says, "I have always a definite object or matter before my eyes. The titles of my pieces correspond to these occasions. Each piece is a kind of portrait."

In Rameau again, we get such things as "Sighs," "Tender Plaints," "The Joyous Girl," "The Cyclops," etc.; and at a slightly later date Dittersdorf (1739-1799) wrote twelve programme symphonies, illustrating Ovid's "Metamorphoses" and "The War of Human Passions."

Mozart's father wrote a musical description of a sledge-journey, in which the ladies are represented shivering with the cold; but Mozart himself avoided the programme form as positively as Bach. Haydn, however, dabbled in it more extensively, as I have already pointed out.

Beethoven's position in the history of programme music is somewhat peculiar. Just about that time, when the Napoleonic wars had familiarised every one with the pomp of armies, there was a perfect deluge of battle pieces. There was probably not a battle of any importance in those days that had not a fantasia written upon it, each differing from the others in little else but its title. In a weak moment Beethoven succumbed to the general temptation and wrote his "Battle of Vittoria," which is not only one of the least significant of his works, but one of the least significant works in the history of programme music. Beethoven's real contributions to this form of art were indirect rather than direct. He told one of his friends that he had always a picture in his mind when composing; and if this could be taken quite literally, it would seem as if we were on the trail of programme music pure and simple. But we shall probably never know the extent to which Beethoven relied on poetic suggestions for his musical inspiration; and if we look at the internal evidence of his music, we shall see that although it often deals with poetic subjects, it treats them from the standpoint of the old forms rather than from that of the new. So far as their intellectual origin is concerned, the superb Leonora, Egmont, and Coriolan overtures are poetic music; that is, they aim, in a musical texture, at sketching a character or telling a story. But so far as the form is concerned in which the composer has chosen to work, the procedure is determined almost entirely by the laws of absolute music. Wagner has drawn attention to this in a well-known passage in his essay on "Liszt's Symphonic Poems." He shows what the formal laws of the old symphony were, and how necessary they were to give logical coherence to abstract music. But, he says, when these laws were applied uncompromisingly to a different kind of art-work—the overture—a disturbance occurred at once between the aims of the overture and the demands of the symphonic form. All that the latter was concerned with was change—the constant representation of themes in new lights. The overture had, in addition to this, to concern itself with dramatic development. "Now it will be obvious," he says, "that, in the conflict of a dramatic idea with this form, the necessity must at once arise either to sacrifice the development (the idea) to the alternation (the form), or the latter to the former." He goes on to praise Gluck's Iphigenia in Aulis overture for the skilful way it keeps the dramatic development from being spoiled by compliance with extraneous laws of form. Then, he says, Beethoven, working on a bigger scale and with a more stupendous imagination than Gluck, nevertheless came to grief on the rock Gluck managed to escape. "He who has eyes," says Wagner, "may see precisely by this overture (i.e. the great Leonora No. 3), how detrimental to the master the maintenance of the traditional form was bound to be. For who, at all capable of understanding such a work, will not agree with me when I assert that the repetition of the first part, after the middle section, is a weakness which distorts the idea of the work almost past all understanding; and that the more, as everywhere else, and particularly in the coda, the master is obviously governed by nothing but the dramatic development. But whoso has brains and lack of prejudice enough to see this, will have to admit that the evil could only have been avoided by entirely giving up that repetition; an abandonment, however, which would have done away with the overture-form—i.e. the original, merely suggestive, symphonic dance-form—and have constituted the departure-point for creating a new form."

Wagner is undoubtedly right. Beethoven hovered uncertainly at times between the demands of poetic expression and the demands of absolute form. To write poetic music pure and simple, of course, was not his mission in the world. That was reserved for other men. One side of his powerful genius was to be taken up by Wagner and pushed to its logical conclusion in the music-drama. Another side, cultivated by Berlioz, Liszt, and Richard Strauss, comes to its logical end in the symphonic poem; and just as Wagner criticised the Beethoven overture from the standpoint of music-drama, I propose, shortly, to criticise Wagner from the standpoint of the symphonic poem. I shall try to show that so far from the Wagnerian opera representing, as Wagner thought, the ideal after which the music of Beethoven was striving, it is really only a transitional form; and that the symphonic poem is the completely satisfactory, completely logical form, to which the Wagnerian opera stands in the same relation as the Leonora overture does to Tristan and Isolde.