I. THE UNITY OF THE SYMPHONY
For the ordinary listener to a symphony the one great difficulty lies in “making sense” out of it as a whole. He enjoys certain themes and is, perhaps, able to follow their devious wanderings, but he retains no comprehensive impression of the symphony as a complete thing, and he may even never conceive it as anything more than a series of interesting or uninteresting passages of music. Now, it is obvious that an art of pure sound, if it is to have any significance at all, must have complete coherence within itself, and that the longer the sounds go on the more necessary does this coherence become. This is, of course, the problem of all music. Even opera must have a certain musical coherence, for it cannot depend entirely on being held together by the text and action; even the song must make musical sense in addition to what sense (by chance) there is in the words. Give what glowing, what romantic, even what definite title you will to a piece of programme music,—call it “The Hebrides,” or “Death and Transfiguration,” or descend to such a title as “A Simple Confession,”—you must still give your music coherence in itself. As a matter of fact, the titles of pieces of programme music do not lessen the composer’s responsibilities in the least, and there is no fine piece of such music in existence that does not obey the general laws of form as applied to music. The title is, after all, merely a suggestion, an indication, an atmosphere. Schumann’s “The Happy Farmer” is merely jolly; it is not even bucolic, and you hunt for the farmer in vain; “Träumerei” is made rhythmically vague in order to create the illusion of reverie, but has, nevertheless, complete musical coherence; “Tod und Verklärung” of Strauss contains no evidence of sacrificing its form to its so-called “subject,” and the Wagnerian leit-motif is suggestive and not didactic.
The development of form in the symphony is too large a subject to be covered here, but there are certain fundamental aspects of it upon which I may dwell with safety, since they obey laws which apply everywhere. To make clear what I mean let me say that an art whose fundamental quality is movement must have for its problem the disposition within a certain length of time of a certain group of themes or melodies. The distinction between this art and that of painting is that in music the question is “When?” in painting “Where?” In this sense literature is nearer music than is painting, and I shall shortly point out some analogies between literary and musical forms. I stated in the first chapter the fundamental synthetic principle of music, which is that no one series of sounds formed into a melody can long survive the substitution of other series, unless there be given some restatement, or, at least, some reminder of the first. There is no musical form that does not pay tribute directly or indirectly to this principle. And this, much modified by the medium of language, applies also to literature. Most novels contain near the end a “looking backward over traveled roads”; a too great digression from any thesis requires a certain restatement of it. The first appearance of Sandra Belloni is heralded by her singing in the wood near the Poles’ country house. The epilogue to “Vittoria” closes with the scene in the cathedral: “Carlo Merthyr Ammiani, standing between Merthyr and her, with old blind Agostino’s hands upon his head. And then once more, and but for once, her voice was heard in Milan.” The unessential characters and motives of Sandra Belloni disappear in “Vittoria”—Mrs. Chump, an unsuccessful essay in Dickens, finds a deserved oblivion; so do the “Nice Feelings” and the “Fine Shades”; but the presence of Merthyr in the cathedral is as necessary to that situation as is the absence of Wilfred. “War and Peace” would be an inchoate mass of persons, scenes, and events, were it not for certain retrospects here and there which hold the whole mass together. “The Idiot” is a striking illustration, for the early part of Mishkin’s career only appears in the sixth chapter, as if to tide over more successfully the vastness of the scheme; and the final chapter brings back most vividly the experiences of his boyhood. The sonnet is the most concise example of this process, and I do not need to dwell on the precision with which it illustrates it.
One great difference exists, however, between music and literature, and that is in the number of its subjects or characters. “War and Peace,” to take an extreme example, contains scores of characters, while a whole symphony would usually contain not more than twelve or fourteen themes. The prime reason for this is that themes have no established law of association, and so do not represent something else with which we are already familiar as do names of persons in books. We remember the names of such characters as Joseph Andrews or Tom Jones, or even Dr. Portsoaken, for, although they lived a long time ago, we have enough word association to contain their names and we can understand them and can follow the devious courses of their adventures and the philosophy of life they represent. (The absence of this association makes it difficult for us to remember the characters in Russian novels.) When we hear a musical theme, however, we have to remember it as such.
I have frequently stated the somewhat obvious fact that music obeys general æsthetic laws, and the foregoing is intended to show how these laws are modified by the peculiar properties of sound. A symphony in this sense, then, is a coherent arrangement of themes. This brings me to the important question of the detachment or the unification of the several movements of a symphony. Is a symphony one thing or four? Should we listen to it as a unit, or as separate contrasting pieces strung together for convenience? The conventional answer to these questions—the answer given by the textbooks—is that a few symphonies transfer themes from one movement to another, but that, speaking generally, a symphony is a collection of four separate pieces contrasted in speed and in sentiment, etc. Now I wish to combat this theory as vigorously as possible, and I should like to rely solely on general æsthetic laws, and say that no great work of art could, by any possibility, be based on such a heterogeneous plan as that. Or I might base my opinion on psychology and say that, since there are four different movements, different in general and in particular characteristics,—one containing themes which evolve as they proceed, producing the effect of struggle toward a goal, another suited to states of sentiment, another for concise and vivid action, and so forth,—and since the mind of a great man is a microcosm of the world and contains everything, it follows, as a matter of course, that he tries to fuse his symphony into one by filling its several parts with the various elements of himself, a process that has been going on ever since there has been any music at all. The composer is not four men, nor is his mind separated into compartments. One symphony will differ from another because it will represent a different stage in his development, but any one symphony—unless arbitrarily disjointed—will express the various phases of its composer’s nature at the time, and will have a corresponding internal organism. This is sufficient evidence of the soundness of this view in the great symphonies themselves. I cannot specify at length here, but any reader having access to Mozart’s, Beethoven’s, and Brahms’s symphonies or that of César Franck may investigate for himself. Let me merely point out a few instances which I choose from celebrated and familiar symphonies. In the last movement of the C major of Mozart (commonly called the “Jupiter”) there is a rapid figure in the basses at measures nine and ten which is derived from the beginning of the first movement. The theme of the last movement is drawn from—is another version of—the passage in measures three and four of the first movement. In Beethoven’s “Eroica” the first theme of the last movement is drawn directly from the first theme of the first movement. The theme of the C major section of the “Marche Funèbre” is the theme of the first section in apotheosis, and each owes a debt to the first theme of the first movement. Illustrations of this principle could be multiplied almost indefinitely, and it is not too much to say that there is in all great music this inward coherence. In other words, form in music is not merely a sort of framework, or, if you please, a law or precedent, but the expression of an inward force.
Themes having no organic relation are, of course, introduced in symphonic movements for the play of action against each other which results from their antagonism. The novel depends largely on the same element. If it were not for Blifil there could hardly have been a Tom Jones. Sandra Belloni must have Mr. Pericles as a foil to that finer character of hers which rises above the prima donna, and she needs Wilfred and Merthyr in order to achieve Carlo. In short, the symphonic movement is not unlike the novel which is based on the juxtaposition of contrasted or antagonistic characters or elements, the struggle between the two, and, finally, their reconciliation; and sufficient analogy could be drawn between this and life itself to illustrate the principle as a cardinal one. But I believe the symphony to be still in flux. I see no reason why it should not continue to develop from within and finally to achieve an even greater inward coherence than that already attained. This will almost certainly not be brought about by an extension of its outward form or by an enlargement of its resources—as is the case with many modern symphonies.[12] In brief, the composer is an artist like any other; he is dealing with human emotions and aspirations as other artists are; he is subject to the same laws; he, too, draws a true picture of human life in true perspective, with all the adjustments of scene, of persons, of motives, carefully worked out—even though he deals only with sound. It is almost incredible that any one should suppose otherwise; the real difficulty is in getting the ordinary person to suppose anything! So I say that the symphony is a mirror of life, and that all the great symphonies taken together are like a book of life in which everything is faithfully set forth in due proportion and balance.
I have said that the symphony contains everything and that it has room for disorder. This is its ultimate purpose. The secret of its power lies in this. Life itself is an inexplicable thing. The great symphony compresses it into an hour of perfection in which all of its elements are explicable. Here that dream of man which he calls by such names as “heaven” or “happiness,” and which he has always sought in vain, becomes not only a reality, but the only reality possible for him. For nothing would be more terrible than endless happiness or a located heaven.