Wagner as Man & Artist

by Ernest Newman

XIV

Having thus summarised the attitude of Wagner to Beethoven and to poetic music in general, let us proceed to fill in the details of the theory, allowing Wagner, wherever possible, to speak for himself.

He has set forth his views upon Beethoven with the greatest positiveness in his letters to Uhlig, and much more lucidly there than in Opera and Drama.[370] He saw in Beethoven's music the struggle to express a definite poetic idea in an abstract form that necessarily made the communication of the nature of the idea itself impossible. He always protested against the current fashion of performing Beethoven's symphonies as if they were nothing more than agreeable or exciting musical patterns. They were tone poems, and could mean nothing to the hearer unless the poetry at the core of them was made clear. "The essence of the great works of Beethoven," he writes to Uhlig, "is that they are only in the last place Music, but contain in the first place a poetic subject. Or shall we be told that this subject is only taken from music itself? Would not this be like saying that the poet takes his subject from speech, and the painter his from colour? The musical conductor who sees in one of Beethoven's tone-works nothing but the music, is exactly like a reciter who should hold only by the language of a poem, or the explainer of a picture who could not get beyond its colour. This, however, is the case with our conductors, even in the best instances—for many do not even so much as understand the music; they understand the key, the themes, the working of the parts, the instrumentation, and so on, and think that with these they understand the whole of the content of the tone-work."[371] And again: "The characteristic of the great compositions of Beethoven is that they are veritable poems, in which it is sought to bring a real subject to representation. The obstacle to their comprehension lies in the difficulty of finding with certainty the subject that is represented. Beethoven was completely possessed by a subject: his most significant tone pictures are indebted almost solely to the individuality of the subject that filled him; the consciousness of this made it seem to him superfluous to indicate his subject otherwise than in the tone picture itself. Just as our literary poets really address themselves only to other literary poets, so Beethoven, in these works, involuntarily addressed himself only to tone poets. The absolute musician, that is to say the manipulator of absolute music, could not understand Beethoven, because this absolute musician fastens only on the 'How,' and not the 'What.' The layman, on the other hand, could but be completely confused by these tone pictures, and at best only receive pleasure from that which to the tone poet was merely the material means of expression."[372]

Wagner recognised, however, the difficulty of grasping a poetic subject that had not been revealed by the composer, and held that it could only be divined by a poetic musician of the same kind. "If no special poetic subject is expressed in the tone speech, it may undoubtedly pass as easily understandable; for there can here be no question of real understanding. If, however, the expression of the tone speech is conditioned by a poetic subject, this speech at once becomes the most incomprehensible of all, unless the poetic subject be at the same time defined by some other means of expression than those of absolute music.

"The poetic subject of a tone piece by Beethoven is thus only to be divined by a tone poet; for, as I remarked before, Beethoven involuntarily appealed only to such, to those who were of like feelings, like culture, aye, well-nigh like capability with himself. Only a man like this can make these compositions intelligible to the laity, and above all by making the subject of the tone poem clear both to the executants and to the audience, and thus making good an involuntary error in the technique of the tone poet, who omitted this indication. Any other sort of performance of one of Beethoven's veritable tone poems, however technically perfect it may be, must remain incomprehensible in proportion as the understanding is not facilitated in the way I have suggested."[373]

This indeed, he held, was Beethoven's error—an error forced upon him by the conditions of his time—that he should endeavour to make his music truly human without giving the hearer the clue to the emotions upon which it was based. Beethoven's mistake, he says, in one of the happiest and most famous of his analogies, was the same as that of Columbus, who, though merely trying to find the way to the India that was already known, actually discovered thereby a new world.[374] His vain effort to "achieve the artistically necessary in the artistically impossible" has, however, revealed to the modern world the infinitely expressive capacity of music. But though it is only by being fertilised by poetry that music can attain to the full expression of the truly human, Wagner, as was to be expected from one who allowed so little liberty to the imagination in art, was against this fertilisation taking the form of programme music. The poetic content must be communicated immediately and visibly to the hearer by presentation on the stage. In all this, of course, he was once more merely expressing an individual bias, and one that is not in the least binding upon musicians in general. When the musician, he tells us, tries to paint by means of the orchestra alone, what he produces is neither music nor a painting.[375] He failed to perceive not only that instrumental music offers numberless instances of quite successful tone painting, but that a good deal of the pictorialism of his own music has to justify itself by means of the imagination alone. Every time the Feuerzauber, for example, is played in the concert room the imagination supplies, quite successfully, the spectacle of the flames; and even in the theatre it is left to the imagination to picture to itself the waves of the Rhine in the opening scene of the Rhinegold, for while the wave music is going on from the commencement the curtain does not rise until the 126th bar. There is no need to elaborate the point. Hundreds of composers, from Bach to the present day, have "painted" in music time without number without the assistance of a stage setting, the subject of the painting being quite sufficiently indicated either by the words of the poem,—the spinning-wheel in Schubert's Gretchen am Spinnrade, for example,—or by means of an explanatory note or title, as with the modern symphonic poem.

Without pursuing this side issue further now, let us follow up the more essential lines of the Wagnerian theory. We have seen him first of all frame his dramatic action in such a way that while making itself fully intelligible to the spectator it supplies the music with endless opportunities for the outpouring of feeling. Romance and "historical" drama have both been rejected because of their containing so much that, according to Wagner, appeals less to the feeling than to the intellect. It was in the myth that he found the condensation he desired. Upon the myth the composer was to pour out the full flood of his emotion. The form and quality of the musical utterance are to be determined by the poem. Lyrism must no longer be imposed upon the drama from without, as in the older opera, but must grow out of the drama as a necessary consequence. It follows that neither the chorus nor any of the characters is to be employed purely for the purposes of concerted music. In the orchestra the musician has at his disposal an instrument of unlimited expressiveness. The orchestra, as Wagner says, has a capacity of its own for speech. In the Beethoven symphony this capacity was developed to such a height as to urge the orchestra to make the vain attempt to deliver a message which from its very nature it was impossible for it to deliver clearly. That message, however, can be précisé by the Word: and the true function of the orchestra is to announce what cannot be conveyed by speech.[376] Its specific meaning can be still further précisé by means of gesture—not the ordinary gesture of the older opera, which derived solely from the dance pantomime, but gesture that is the visible counterpart of the auditory sensation communicated by the orchestra. The range of this kind of gesture is as wide as human emotion itself. Moreover, the orchestra can carry on the action even after speech and gesture have ceased; it can use themes in such a way as to create presentiment, and it can recall the past. The orchestra in fact, is to the drama of the future what the chorus was to the Greek drama,—a totalised individuality apart from, yet intimately bound up with, the separate individualities on the stage. The musical expression will vary in intensity according to the intensity of the situations. The form of the music drama will therefore be a unified one, but one containing the possibility of an infinite variety of expressions; but it will not be permissible to introduce any expression for the mere sake of musical effect; everything must grow spontaneously out of the emotions and situations presented by the poet. The drama can be thoroughly unified by the employment of salient "leading motives";[377] whereas the older opera had no unity at all, but was a mere conglomeration of arias, duets, ensembles, and so on.[378]