MUSIC AS AN ART OF EXPRESSION
"Art generally ... as such, is nothing but a noble and expressive language, invaluable as a vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing.
"Art, properly so called, is no recreation; it cannot be learned at spare moments, nor pursued when we have nothing better to do. It is no handiwork for drawing-room tables, no relief of the ennui of boudoirs; it must be understood and undertaken seriously or not at all. To advance it, men's lives must be given, and to receive it, their hearts."
These words, among the first written for serious publication by John Ruskin when he was a young graduate of Oxford, are the text of his whole life's teaching.
"Daily and hourly," writes Carlyle, "the world natural grows out of a world magical to me.... Daily, too, I see that there is no true poetry but in reality."
More than two thousand years before Plato had written in the third book of his Republic against the indifference to manly virtue and the cult of a languishing effeminacy in the poetry and art of his day. He inveighs against the [Greek: panarmonia] and [Greek: poluchodia] of the musicians, by which we may understand over-instrumentation,--as if the Athenians even then had their Berliozes and Strausses--and continues (I quote from Jowett's translation): "Neither we nor our guardians whom we have to educate can ever become musical until we and they know the essential forms of temperance ([Greek: so¯phrosunae]), courage, liberality, magnificence ([Greek: megalorepeia]), and their kindred, etc."
The teaching of all these three great masters, and I might have multiplied quotations from the works of the greatest--but only from those of the greatest--thinkers of ancient and modern times, is the same: that art is not a mere play of beautiful forms, but that the artist must know a truth and have been able to express it; that his work must be approved or condemned according as that truth is healthful or the reverse. It is the doctrine of sincerity, and is opposed to the common and weaker doctrine of "art for art's sake"--i.e. that art is self-contained, that we occupy ourselves with it solely for the pleasure which it affords through our senses, that it has no didactic purpose. By this latter view, beauty in art is an idea quite distinct from utility or morality; by the other, beauty, utility, and morality are fundamentally one, being all emanations from the one supreme Idea of creation named by Plato--"the Good," or "the Good in itself," "the Idea of Good."
Can we apply this distinction to music? All the other arts derive their subject-matter from the material world, but Polyhymnia seems to detach herself from her sisters, to soar away from the things of this earth, and to dwell in the ethereal regions of pure ideality. The objects of painting, poetry, sculpture, etc., are those of our surroundings; the artist only puts the things familiar to us in nature in a new light, and, by concentrating the attention upon certain aspects, reveals much that minds less poetic than his had not noticed before. The morality which these arts are able to convey is the morality of nature. But music is not concerned with any material objects; its means are rhythm, melodic intervals, harmony, all purely ideal existences, and seemingly all connected in some mysterious way with number, itself an immaterial idea of time. And although the manner of our perception of harmony has, to some extent, that of melody to a still smaller extent, been explained in our time by physiologists, the explanations only relate to the form of our perception. They show how, through the harmonic overtones, the mind is able to recognize the connection between a chord and the one which preceded it, but cannot tell why one progression of harmonies is pleasant, another the reverse, as Helmholtz himself was fully aware. How then can it be possible for music to be a vehicle of thought? What can it have to do with "temperance, courage, liberality"?
The question is not one which I can hope fully to answer within these pages, but it cannot be altogether passed over; we must know something of the nature of music, must have some clear notion of what it is if we are to understand its relation to language in the drama. The explanation given by Leibnitz that it is an exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi is quite inadequate. Music is not a purely intellectual affection like that of number and proportion, but is in the highest degree emotional. The pleasure which we receive from contemplating a mathematical process of great complexity is altogether different from that of music. Highly complex as are the mathematical relations of the vibrations which convey musical tones from the instrument to the ear the final result of those relations, the impression on the rods of Corti's organ in the Cochlea, are as purely physiological as the impressions of touch. Scientific, i.e. inductive, research must always find an end at the point where the organs become too small for observation; it can throw no light on the nature of the impression transmitted from Corti's organ to the consciousness.
A suggestion has been put forward by Schopenhauer which may be viewed as an attempt to explain transcendentally the nature of music. It is well known that, according to Schopenhauer, a work of art represents the (Platonic) Idea of the object which it depicts, this Idea being itself the first and highest stage of objectivation of Will. Music is, however, a direct objectivation of Will, i.e. not through an Idea.
Music, therefore, is not like the other arts the image (Abbild) of an Idea, but an image of the Will itself, of which the Ideas are also the objectivity. This is why the impression which music makes upon us is so much more powerful and more penetrating than that of the other arts, for they tell only of the shadow, music of the substance. But inasmuch as it is the same will that objectivates itself, only in quite different ways in the Ideas and in music, so there results, not indeed a resemblance, but rather a parallelism, an analogy between music and the Ideas which appear in the world, multiplied and imperfect as phenomena.
Beyond this we must not follow our author. Schopenhauer no doubt possessed a very keen sense for music, but his theoretical education was of the slightest, and his further remarks make the impression of his having read up ad hoc some theoretical writer of his time. But we may accept his definition as at least a first step in the inquiry.
The objective world lies before us in two forms, as light and as sound. From the visible world of light we receive all the data for our understanding, in the forms of time, space, and causality. Beside it lies the world of sound, in time alone, and appealing directly to our inner emotional consciousness, or, as we vaguely express it, to the "feelings," which the light-world can only reach indirectly through the understanding. Both these worlds are fundamentally one, differing only in their manifestation, and, however diverse they may appear, they are united by the element common to both, Rhythm. In general the language of the understanding is articulate speech, that of the emotions is music. The Unity subsisting between these two worlds, of understanding and emotion, of language and music, can only be realized intuitively; it can scarcely be demonstrated. But we have vivid illustrations of it in many familiar facts, for instance, that animals are able to make themselves understood to us and to each other without articulate language, by gesture and song. Thus we have the mutual relations of the two dramatic elements. Shortly stated, words tell the story, music the feelings of the persons. Gesture would seem to hold a place between language and song, appealing to the emotions as directly, and sometimes almost as forcibly as sound.[[31]] These relations are not so sharply marked off from each other as appears in the analysis. In a highly wrought organism each part, while keeping strictly to its own functions, is nevertheless capable to some extent, when necessity arises, of extending its field. It is like a well-disciplined army where the duties of each unit are strictly laid down, but where the units themselves possess intelligence and are capable when needful of independent action, and a continual intercommunication between all the parts ensures their harmonious working.
[31.] The reader who is interested will find the subject more fully treated in Wagner's Beethoven.
Applying what has been said to the drama let us select one incident of our work, the tearing down of the torch by Isolde in the second act. The words have told us that the torch is a signal of danger, and now the sounds of the hunt having died away, its removal informs Tristan that the way is clear for him to approach. More than this the poet could scarcely do in the words. To have expatiated upon the awful consequences which the lovers know full well must inevitably follow, on the conflict of hope, awe, heroic resolution, defiance of the certain death before them--to have told all this in words would have necessitated a long speech, most unnatural and undramatic at such a moment of tension, and could scarcely have avoided degenerating into bombast. By a few simple transitions, a few devices of instrumentation, the orchestra relates all this and much more, while Isolde's flute-motive, so exquisitely graceful and tender in the preceding scene, has now become a shriek of resolution bewildered but undaunted in the supreme crisis, above the savage call of the trumpets to death. So far the music; we see in the torch hurled from its shining post and left expiring on the ground, a symbol of the drama that is concentrated in the act; of Tristan's glory extinguished in the realm of night. All this in the scenic representation forms one issue, the different elements coalescing in the hearer's mind into a single dramatic incident.
Wagner's view of the relation of music to words has been the subject of much controversy, often unhappily very heated. Before Wagner the common notion was that music in combination with words had only to enforce them and to accentuate their declamation. Such was the view of Gluck. As regards lyric productions, the setting of songs to music, this principle may be sufficient, but the case is different when both words and music are controlled by a dramatic action.
Another view places music in a class altogether by itself, apart from the other arts, and unable to unite with them except in so far as to employ them as its vehicle. Wherever music appears in company with poetry, music must take the lead, must be governed by its own laws, retain its own forms, while poetry, its compliant servant, must avoid all higher expression and accommodate itself as best it can to the music. So the highest form of music will be instrumental, where it is unfettered by the ties of poetry.
A little work published in the fifties by the Vienna critic, Dr. E. Hanslick, entitled Vom musikalisch-Schönen, discusses this question very fully. It attained great celebrity at the time of its publication and is still read. It is the best attempt that I have seen to state theoretically the case against Wagner in sober and reasoned language, and though it contains a few misunderstandings it is free from offensive personalities and well worthy of attention. The author is a disciple of that school of German aestheticians of which F. Th. Vischer is the foremost representative.
According to Dr. Hanslick, music, being an art isolated from objective nature, can never be anything but music. Whatever it expresses can only be stated in terms of music; it can never present a definite human "feeling." The essence of music is movement, and it can represent certain dynamic ideas. Thus, although it can never express love, hope, longing, etc., since those feelings involve a perception (Vorstellung) or a concept (Begriff), things foreign to its nature, it can represent given ideas as strong, weak, increasing, diminishing, etc.--or as anything which is a function of time, movement, and proportion. It can also by analogy suggest in the hearer the ideas of pleasing, soft, violent, elegant, and the like. Whatever is beyond this is symbolical. Movement and symbolism are the only means by which music can express anything. The notion that music can express a definite feeling was, the author declares, universally held by aestheticians at that time, and amongst those who held it he seems to include Wagner. By way of exposing its fallacy he quotes the air from Gluck's Orpheus:
It would be possible, he says, to substitute words of an exactly opposite meaning--
J'ai trouvé mon Euridice,
Rien n'égale mon bonheur--
without the music being affected in any way. This being so, he continues, music can never unite with words to express any notion at all, and the only form artistically admissible is absolute or instrumental music. The pleasure which it imparts is the same as that which we derive from a kaleidoscope, except in so far as it is ennobled by the fact of its emanating from a human mind instead of from a machine. The union of music with words is a morganatic marriage, in which the words must suffer violence. With this the author believes himself to have demolished Wagner's canon that in the musical drama the music is only a means, the end being the drama.
Undoubtedly there is much truth in these observations. If for the moment we confine our attention to instrumental music it is undeniable that a musical melody in itself can never be anything but music. Wagner himself has insisted that music attains all the fulness of which it is capable as absolute or instrumental music, and as this truth has been too often forgotten by composers, we have nothing but gratitude for an author who once more strives to bring it into notice. But it is only a one-sided truth, and insufficient. By the same rigid reasoning it might be contended that a human face, being nothing but modelling and colour, can never express anything but functions of lines and forms, and colours. Everything in nature as well as in art has for those who look below the surface a significance beyond its external features. Nor does it follow that music will always remain content with its own glorious isolation, that it will never seek for union with other arts, sacrificing indeed its pristine purity, but gaining mightily in warm human expression. Even in the heyday of absolute music, in the instrumental compositions of Sebastian Bach, we may notice this tendency, though here it is rather the dance than poetry with which it strives to ally itself; while in Beethoven's symphonies the yearning for human community and human fellowship is noticeable from the first, and in the final work it breaks its bonds and dissolves into song.
The primary error in Dr. Hanslick's argument is that it begins at the wrong end, and tacitly assumes that art can be controlled by theoretical speculations. An a priori development of the theory of art out of supposed first principles must in the end lead to contradictions and absurdities, and every one must feel his conclusion that the union of music and words is illegitimate--a view which, among other things, would deprive us of Schubert's songs--to be an absurdity. Had the inquiry commenced with familiar instances from existing works of art in which music is felt to possess a very vivid power of expression and then been carried backwards to find what it can express and what not, and what are the conditions of its expression, the results might have been valuable and we should have been spared a dissertation resting wholly upon confusion of the meaning of words. Here a definite meaning has been attached to the word "feeling" (Gefühl); it is understood as including such feelings as "hope," "love," "fear," etc. These, of course, music cannot express. Wagner himself insists that music can never express a definite feeling, and even censures it as a "misunderstanding" on the part of Beethoven that in his later works he attempted to do so.[[32]] The best word to denote what music can express is that used by Helmholtz--Gemüthstimmung--untranslatable into English, but for which we may use the term "emotional mood" as denoting something similar. It is a tuning or a tone of the mind, a mood that music expresses, and from a word of such vague meaning there is no risk of false deductions being drawn.
[32.] Wagner, Ges. Schr., iii. 341; iv. 387.
All our musical sense revolts against the dictum that music cannot under any circumstances express a general feeling. Take, for example, Agatha's outburst on seeing the approach of her lover Max in the second act of Der Freischütz:
Would it be possible to hear this passage and not feel the melody as a direct and most vivid expression of joy?--joy, that is, in the abstract, but not a definite joy at some given event--that is told by the words and scenery? Whatever share words and gesture may contribute is as nothing compared with that exultant and rapturous outburst of melody. Wherever there is any character-drawing in Italian opera, it is in the music, not in the words, as, for example, in the more dramatic portions of Elvira's music in Don Giovanni. The frequent movement in octaves imparts a nobility and dignity to her expression which are altogether absent in the words.
The paraphrase of the words of the air from Gluck's Orphée is amusing enough as a jeu d' esprit, but surely cannot be taken seriously. Hanslick seems to have misapprehended the music; it does not express grief, and is not intended to. The words express the desolation of Orpheus at the loss of his beloved, but the Stimmung of the melody is one of calm resignation. It is the serene self-restraint with which Gluck loves to imbue his classic heroes and heroines, and which is equally appropriate to joy and grief. Grillparzer, whose authority both as a dramatist and as a sensitive lover of music is rightly esteemed very highly, has declared that it would be possible to take any one of Mozart's arias, and set words of quite different meaning to them. This may be true of many of Mozart's arias, which were often composed more with regard to the organ of a particular singer than to the text before him, but is assuredly not true of his great dramatic scenes and finales.
Whatever value such speculations may possess vanishes before the unconscious instinct of the creating artist. It is well known that German dramatists and poets have from the beginning felt keenly the need of musical expression. If the need was less felt by English dramatists of our great period the reason is that it required the development of music in the hands of the great German masters before its power could be fully known. Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Hoffmann, Richter, and a host of others all sighed for the aid of music.[[33]] Kleist declared music to be the root of all the other arts. Their dream could not be realized until the right form of the drama which could unite with music had been found. It was at last found by Wagner after repeated trial and failure. He determined the form as that in which the characters act out of their own inner impulses. The historical drama shows men as torn hither and thither by external political considerations. The action is impelled by wheels within wheels of intrigue and complex psychological mechanism. For such subjects the romance, with its almost unlimited powers of expatiation, is the proper vehicle, but they are unfitted for music; they necessitate wearisome explanations of complicated motives altogether foreign to the direct emotional character of musical drama. The musical character is the one who is entirely himself, and whose motives are therefore clear from the first; such subjects are to be found above all in the mythologies of imaginative and poetically gifted peoples. That does not of course mean that other subjects are excluded, for there is no domain of life which may not offer the same conditions, provided only that the characters have a strong and well-marked individuality. When once this principle was discovered the musical drama became a reality. Wagner uses for this form of drama the term reinmenschlich--purely human--an expression which was in keeping with the humanitarian views prevalent at the time when he wrote, but not free from objection and apt to be misunderstood in our day.
[33. ] Many utterances of German poets to this effect will be found reproduced in Chamberlain's Richard Wagner.
If the drama longed for the means of expressing its own inmost nature, no less did music seek for a nearer approach to objectivity and to the conditions of human existence. If it is true that music is the root of all the arts, then it must also be the root of human life, and must seek to reveal itself in life and in the drama which is the mirror of life. The desire for human expression is already, as we have seen, very clearly discernible in the symphonies and sonatas of Beethoven, but it is since his time that the most remarkable development has taken place. The programme music of Berlioz, Liszt, and other composers has rightly been condemned by many critics, but the mistake was in the manner of the composition rather than in the intention, which was natural, indeed inevitable. Wagner's assertion that with Beethoven "the last symphony has been written"--rationally understood, of course, as meaning that nothing beyond is possible on instrumental lines--is quite true. There was nothing left but for music to take form in things of human interest. Only the composers, perhaps as much from want of an adequate dramatic form as from want of skill, failed to attain their end. While evidently striving to follow out Beethoven's hint, mehr Ausdruck der Empfindung als Malerei, their powers failed, and they produced more Malerei than Empfindung. The reader may consider by the light of these remarks the passage in Liszt's Faust symphony in the slow movement, where Gretchen is represented as plucking a daisy, repeating, "He loves me, he loves me not," etc. The composer has depicted the scene with wonderful skill and exquisite poetic feeling, but the essence of Goethe's scene, which lies entirely in its unconscious innocence, is gone in this highly wrought artificial presentation. It is the difference between nature and art, between the naïve, pure-minded maiden and the actress painted and decorated for the stage.
There are few persons, I believe, who on hearing an instrumental composition do not feel a desire to form a mental picture of its contents, so to speak, to objectivate it in their minds. Aestheticians tell us that we are wrong, and we are apt to laugh at each other's pictures, but we all do it. Beethoven, as we know from his friend Schindler and his pupil Ries, often, if not always, had some object before him when composing his instrumental works. The fact that the same music suggests different interpretations to different minds will not disturb us if we remember that music does not and never can depict or describe its object: for that we have the arts of poetry and painting. What music can give is the emotional mood which it calls forth, and which may be common to many objects very different in their external character. A "stormy" movement may be referred to a storm of winds and waves, or to a storm of human passions, and so might suggest a battle, a shipwreck, a revolution, a violent emotion of love or hatred, or a play of Shakespeare. But the aversion which we naturally feel to the labelling of sonatas and symphonies with titles is in my opinion justifiable,[[34]] because here we recognize an attempt to stereotype one particular interpretation, instead of leaving the mind of each hearer free to form his own.
[34.] The latest and most atrocious outrage on good taste in this respect is the labelling of Beethoven's great B flat sonata as "the Hammerklavier." All musicians of finer feeling should unite to kill this absurd name.
A musical composition is a vessel into which many wines can be poured. It cannot in itself express either any material object or any definite feeling which involves such an object. No music can alone, without a suggestion from elsewhere, express a person, a place, or love or fear or a battle or "a calm sea and prosperous voyage," or any similar thing. But it has a marvellous power of receiving suggestions which are offered to it, by words or otherwise, of carrying them on and, by means of its own forces of movement and proportion, intensifying their expression to, a degree inconceivable without its aid. Mathematics present an exact analogy to music, and are to science what music is to art. Both are ideal forms which in one sense only attain complete individuality when they are pure, but in another sense have no meaning until they are applied to some object of nature. A mathematical formula is only true so long as it remains an ideal in the mind; but its existence has no other purpose than to state a law for material phenomena, when it at once loses its essential qualities as a mathematical formula, certainty and accuracy. In this way we may understand simultaneously the supremacy of absolute music and the truth for which Wagner contends, that music can never be anything but expression.
Dr. Hanslick's dictum that music has no other means for its expression than movement and symbolism cannot be admitted. It can express through association. All the senses have in some degree the faculty of recalling in the mind impressions with which they have once been associated. Who has never had the memory of his home or of some place familiar to his childhood recalled by the scent of a flower or a plant? No sense possesses this power in anything like the same degree as that of hearing, especially when the connection has been established through a musical strain. It is on this principle that Wagner mainly relies in his dramatic musical motives. In itself the connection is in the first instance artificial. A musical strain of a striking individual character is brought into connection with some idea of the drama, it may be a person or a scene or an incident, in short, anything which may serve as a dramatic motive, and thenceforward whenever the musical strain is heard, the idea with which it has been associated will be called up in the mind of the hearer. All the resources of modern music are then at the disposal of the composer for exhibiting his motive in the most varied lights, intensifying, varying, contrasting, or combining with other motives, as the dramatic situation requires.
It often happens that the musical strain is heard before its association with an idea of the drama has been established, as, for example, in the instrumental prelude. The idea then seems to hover in the music as a vague presentiment (Ahnung) of something that is to come. A superb example of this occurs at the end of Die Walküre. Wotan has laid his daughter to rest, and surrounded her with a barrier of fire. "Let none cross this fire who dreads my spear," he cries, and at once the threat is answered by a defiant blast from the trombones uttering a strain which has not yet taken definite form, but which we learn from the sequel is the theme proper to Siegfried the hero, who is destined to bring to an end the power of the god.
Or the motive may reappear after it has served its purpose on the stage; it is then a reminiscence of past events. No finer example of this could be found than in the music of Isolde's swan-song, the so-called Liebestod, which is built up out of the motives of the life into a symphonic structure of almost unparalleled force and truth.
[CHAPTER X]
SOME REMARKS ON THE MUSICAL DICTION OF TRISTAN UND ISOLDE
Before beginning the detailed consideration of our work, I wish to say a few words on some features of the music. As I am writing for the general reader and not for the musician, I shall endeavour to express myself in generally understood terms, and avoid technical details.
Each of Wagner's works presents a distinct and strongly defined musical physiognomy marking it off from all the others. The music of each is cast in its own mould and is at once recognizable from that of the rest. The most characteristic features of the music of Tristan und Isolde are its concentrated intensity and the ineffable sweetness of its melody. The number of musical-dramatic motives employed is very small, but they are insisted upon and emphasized by a musical working out unparalleled in the other works. In Rheingold, for example, some twelve or fifteen motives--if we count only those of well-marked contours, and which are used in definite dramatic association--can be distinguished; whereas in the whole of Tristan there are of such Leitmotive in the narrowest sense not more than three or four. The treatment is also very different. The Ring is not entirely innocent of what has been wittily called the "visiting-card" employment of motives, while in Tristan the musical motive does not repeat, but rather supplements, the words, indicating what these have left untold, thus entering as truly into the substance of the drama as it does into that of the music.
The most important motive of all, the one which pervades the drama from beginning to end, is the love-motive. Its fundamental form is that in which it appears in the second bar of the Prelude in the oboe (No. 1).[[35]] Variants of it occur without the characteristic semitone suspension (1a) or with a falling seventh (1b). The cello motive of the opening phrase of the Prelude may also be considered as derived from the same by contrary movement (1c).
[35.] See the musical examples at the end.
Of equal importance, though occurring less frequently, and only at important and decisive moments, is the death-motive (2). This motive is less varied than the last, recurring generally in the same key--A flat passing into C minor--and with similar instrumentation, the brass and drums entering pp on the second chord.
The second act opens with a strongly marked phrase which is the musical counterpart of the great metaphor so conspicuous throughout the act, of the day as destructive of love. The working out of this motive whilst the lovers are together is a marvel of musical composition, and it always returns in the same connection.
Perhaps we may also include among these fundamental musical-dramatical motives one occurring in the middle of the second act at the words "Sehnen hin zur heilgen Nacht" (No. 4). It is akin to the death-motive proper, but the solemn harmonies are here torn asunder into a strain so discordant that without the dramatic context it would scarcely be bearable. It is the rending of the bond with this life and with the day. The music here reminds us that, however heroically the lovers accept their inevitable end, they feel that it means a rough and painful severance from that life which was once so dear and beautiful. Other motives are reminiscences more or less of a purely musical nature or connected only in a general way with scenes or incidents of the drama. They call back indistinctly scenes of bygone times, and will be spoken of as they occur in the work.
The best preliminary study for Wagner's use of motives is that of Beethoven's sonatas and symphonies. Macmillan's Magazine for July, 1876, contains a valuable article by the late Mr. Dannreuther which will be useful as an introduction, and ought to be familiar to all who are interested in modern developments of music. Mr. Dannreuther there treats of the type of variation peculiar to Beethoven, which he compares to the metamorphosis of insects or of the organs of plants: "It is not so much the alteration of a given thought, a change of dress or of decoration, it is an actual creation of something new and distinct from out of a given germ." He then proceeds to trace the principle in some of Beethoven's later works, and shows how for example the great B flat sonata (Op. 106) is built upon a scheme of rising tenths and falling thirds; the A flat sonata (Op. 110) upon two simple melodies. Wagner's procedure is similar; he takes a musical motive which has already been used and brings forth out of it something totally new, scarcely resembling its parent in external features, and yet recognizable as the same.
The problem before Wagner was how to render this new acquisition available for the drama, and we shall best understand him if we look upon him as all his life seeking its solution, each work representing an experimental stage rather than a perfectly finished model. In the earlier part of the Ring he began with a purely conventional conjunction of a musical strain with a tangible and visible object--a ring, a giant, a goddess, etc. This is wrong method, and, although generally his instinctive sense of dramatic propriety kept him from going very far astray, the effects of his wrong procedure are occasionally visible. Why, for example, should a given melody in thirds on two bassoons denote a ring? and why should it bear a thematic kinship to another melody denoting Walhall? The association is purely conventional and serves no purpose, for the material object, a ring, is fully expressed in the word; there is nothing more to be said about it than that it is just a ring, and we do not want the bassoons to repeat or confirm what is quite intelligible without them. In Tristan this pitfall is mostly avoided, but it is in Die Meistersinger and Parsifal that we find the motives most skilfully employed.
A critical analysis of the harmonic structure of our work does not fall within the scope of this treatise. It will be found in text-books specially devoted to the subject. I can here only offer a few general remarks.
Modern harmonies are made theoretically much more difficult than they need be by our system of notation, which grew up in the Middle Ages. The old modes knew no modulation in our sense, and in the seventeenth century, when the tempered system came into vogue, making every kind of modulation possible, the old notation was retained. How unsuited it is for modern music appears from the drastic contradictions which it involves. It is quite a common thing to see the same note simultaneously written as F sharp in one part and as G flat in another. This is what makes modern harmony seem so much more difficult than it really is, for when the music comes to be heard, these formidable-looking intervals resolve themselves into something quite natural and generally not difficult of apprehension by a musical ear. Unfortunately we are compelled to learn music through the medium of a keyed instrument, generally through the most unmusical of instruments, the piano, and we learn theory largely through the eye and the reason instead of through the ear. The problems of harmony will seem much simpler if we remember that its basis is the interval--music does not know "notes" as such, but only intervals--that the number of possible intervals is very small and their relations quite simple, and that everything which is not reducible to a very simple vulgar fraction is heard, not as a harmony, but as a passing note, an inflection of a note of a chord. In fact the advance made in chord combinations since the introduction of the tempered system is not very great. All, or nearly all, the chords used by Wagner are to be found in the works of Bach. The suggestion to explain Wagner's harmonies by assuming a "chromatic scale" rests upon a misapprehension of the nature of a scale. Every scale implies a tonality, i.e. a tonic note, to which all the other notes bear some definite numerical relation. There cannot be a chromatic scale in the scientific sense in music; what we call by that name in a keyed instrument is merely a diatonic scale with the intervals filled in; it always belongs to a definite key, and the accidentals are only passing notes. It is in passing notes that we must seek the key to Wagner's harmonies. With Wagner more than with any other composer since Bach the parts must be read horizontally as well as vertically. As long as we look upon harmonic progressions as vertical columns of chords following one upon the other we may indeed explain, but we shall never understand them. Each chord must be viewed as the result of the confluence of all the separate voices moving harmoniously together. This, too, will help us to grasp the character of "altered" chords, so lavishly employed by Wagner, and of "inflection," by which term I mean to denote all kinds of passing notes, appoggiaturas, suspensions, changing notes, and the like. All are phenomena of harmonic notes striving melodically onwards, either upwards or downwards.
Although little has been done in the invention of new combinations, the character of the harmonic structure has changed considerably since the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This is evident at first glance on comparing a score of Haydn or Mozart with one of Wagner or Liszt. There, although chromatic harmonies are not unfrequent, they occur only sporadically, the general structure being diatonic, whereas with the later masters the whole tissue is chromatic; the score fairly bristles with accidentals, and a simple major or minor triad is the exception. Very different too is the periodic structure. The phrases no longer fall naturally into eight-bar periods interpunctuated with cadences, but are determined by the text, and although the eight-bar scheme is generally maintained--much disguised, it is true, but still recognizable--it is determined not by half-closes at the sections, but by the eight beats of the two-line metre, while the periods follow each other in even flow without any indication of cadence. In other words the musical form is governed by the declamation.
Theory of harmony is one thing, living music quite another. The musical hearer of a work like Tristan und Isolde will understand its harmonic structure, though he know nothing of the theoretical progression of the chords, provided the performance be good, i.e. correct, just as a man ignorant of grammar will understand a sentence which is clearly enunciated. The composer needs no theory of harmony; his ear is his only guide, as the eye of the artist is a sufficient guide for his colouring without any theory of colour. There is only one thing which the composer must keep before him and which the hearer must consciously be able to recognize--the Tonality. The problem of harmony therefore in practice reduces itself to that of modulation. To recognize the tonality quickly and certainly, look for the cadences. They are as it were landmarks, placed along the melodic road, indicating from time to time where we are.
I cannot dismiss the subject of harmony without mentioning the chord which from its employment at decisive moments and its extraordinary mystic expressiveness has been called the soul of the Tristan music. Its direct form is
as it occurs in the beginning of the Prelude.
The instrumentation of Tristan does not present any special features different from that of Wagner's other works. It is less heavily scored than the Ring, and at the same time the instrumentation is more concentrated. Wagner usually employs his wind in groups of at least three in each colour--e.g. three flutes, two oboi and one English horn, two clarinets and a bass clarinet, etc.--and so is able to keep his colours pure. It is partly to this that the extraordinary purity of his tone in the tutti is due, partly also to the sonority imparted to the brass by means of the bass tuba, and still more to the consummate skill of the composer in the distribution of his parts.
There is an interesting note at the beginning of the score in which the composer seems to be trying to excuse himself for using valve instruments in the horns. While admitting the degradation of tone and loss of the power of soft binding resulting from the use of valves, he thinks that the innovation (which I need scarcely observe is not his) is justified by the advantage gained in greater freedom of movement. In such matters one must be allowed to form one's own judgment, and though it may seem like trying to teach a fish to swim, a humble amateur may be permitted to wish that Wagner had here resisted the tide of progress. It is not only that the tone and power of binding are injured, but the whole character of horns and trumpets is altered when they are expected to sing chromatic passages like the violin and the clarinet. As the point is of some interest, I should like to bring it before the reader with some examples. The essential character of the horns is nowhere more truly conveyed than in the soft passage near the beginning of the overture to Der Freischütz, and it is the contrast between the two nature scales on the C horn and the F horn which gives the character to this lovely idyll. The trumpets are capable of even less variety of expression than the horns, as their individuality is even more strongly marked. How entirely that character is conditioned by the mechanism of the instrument may be illustrated by an example. The third movement of Beethoven's seventh symphony contains an interlude molto meno mosso. The choral theme is accompanied by a continuous A, sustained in octave in the violins, which in the intervals between the verses descends to G sharp and returns
The repeat at the end enters ff. after a strong crescendo, and at this point the sustained A is taken over from the violins by the trumpets and given forth with piercing distinctness above the tutti of the orchestra, the effect being one of extraordinary brilliancy. Now comes the point with which we are concerned. In the intervals the trumpet cannot descend to G sharp, because it has not got the note in its natural scale, and is therefore obliged to repeat
Indisputably the composer would have written G sharp had the trumpet been able to play it; it was only the defective scale of the instrument which led him to write A, but the effect of hearing A when we expect G sharp is electrifying; the unbending rigidity of the trumpet is here expressed with a vividness and force which nothing else could have given.
Many more examples might be brought from the works of the great composers to show how the horns and trumpets have lost in expressive power by having adopted the chromatic scale of other instruments. Wagner's use of the brass generally is most skilful; he is especially happy in avoiding the blatancy and coarseness which soils the scores of some composers. Neither trumpets nor drums are much used continuously in the score of Tristan. The former are often employed in the lower part of their scale and only for particular effects. Trombones generally utter single chords, or slow successions of chords, adding solemnity to the sound, and crowning a climax. A favourite instrument with Wagner is the harp, and he uses it freely in Tristan. The effect is, as it were, to place the orchestra upon springs, adding lightness and elasticity to the tone, as may be noticed in the accompaniment to the duet at the end of the first act.
We often hear Wagner's melody described as if it were not melody in the ordinary meaning of the word, but a kind of "recitative" or "declamation." The great French singer, Madame Viardot Garcia, was asked on one occasion in a private circle to sing the part of Isolde. She took the score and sang it a prima vista to Klindworth's accompaniment. On being told that in Germany singers could not be found to undertake the part, alleging that it was too difficult and unmelodious, she naïvely asked whether German singers were not musical! Assuredly any person to whom Wagner's music, especially that of Tristan, appears unmelodious is unmusical, or at least defective in the sense for melody. Wagner's music is easy to sing; much easier, for example, than that of Mozart. This, however, is only true for singers who are highly musical. The great majority have not had any real musical education, and it is to these that the common notion that Wagner's music is unsingable, that it ruins the voice, is due. The notion that recitative and melody are things opposed to one another is itself a misunderstanding. The characteristic mark of recitative in the narrow sense is that it is not bound by rhythmic forms, and therefore has a somewhat dry, matter-of-fact character, which would become tedious if it continued unrelieved--as life would be dull without any sweets. Wagner says: "My melody is declamation, and my declamation melody." There is no line of demarcation; they are as inseparably united as emotion and intellect. But although the stream of emotion in human life is continuous, it is not continually at the same tension. Moments of high exaltation alternate with more subdued intervals, and a very large part of the mechanical routine of life is emotionally almost quiescent. In the drama the emotional element alternates with the narrative, and according as the one or the other predominates, the weight of the expression is in the music or the words; each therefore rises and falls in alternation. Even in Shakespeare's spoken drama traces of this ebb and flow may be noticed, the language becoming more musical under the stress of higher emotion. In the opera the intervals between the lyric arias, etc., had to be filled in with dry explanation or narrative, and there arose the recitative secco, a rapid recitation in which the melody is reduced to a mere shadow. The German language was unfitted for dry recitative of this type, and these filling-in parts had therefore to be spoken--a device which proved intolerable, since it destroyed the illusion of the music. Wagner, as we saw, got over the difficulty by choosing a form of drama in which the emotional element was supreme, and the narrative filling in reduced to a minimum. We further saw how in Tristan und Isolde the principle is driven to such an exaggerated extreme as sometimes to render the action almost unintelligible. Nowhere is the music unmelodious or uninteresting, but it is elastic and pliable and changes its character with the emotional intensity of the dramatic situation, being more subdued in parts of the first act, asserting itself whenever rage, irony, tenderness, or other emotion call for expression; omnipotent in the great love-duet, culminating in the nocturne, and once more soaring in highest ecstasy in Isolde's dissolution, with endless gradations in the portions between. Hearers who are not accustomed to the dramatic expression of music attend only to those moments of intense lyric expression, just as in the opera they attend only to the arias; all else appears to them uninteresting and unmelodious. This is to miss the essential thing in Wagner's works--the drama itself; but it is precisely what is done by those hearers who are incapable of the effort of following attentively the dramatic development.