II. STAGES OF ITS DEVELOPMENT
The history of the symphony is the history of all art. It moves in cycles; it marks a parabola. It began as a naïve expression of feeling; it learned little by little how to master its own working material, and as it mastered that, it became more and more conscious in its efforts; as soon as new instruments for producing it were perfected, it immediately expanded its style to correspond to the new possibilities; as its technique permitted, it continually sought to grasp more and more of the elements of human life and human aspiration and to express them. In Haydn we see it as naïve, folk-like, tuneful music, not highly imaginative, smacking of the soil—like Burns, but without his deep human feeling. In Mozart it reaches a stage of classic perfection which may be compared to Raphael’s paintings. Hardly a touch of the picturesque, the romantic, or the realistic mars its serene beauty; it smiles on all alike; it is not for you or for me,—as Schumann is,—but for every one. And being purely objective it belongs to no time and lasts forever. And how delightful are Mozart’s digressions. He is like Fielding, who, when he wants to philosophize about his story, proceeds to write a whole chapter during which the action awaits the philosopher’s pleasure. Later writers never drop the argument for a moment; if there is a lull in the action it is somehow kept in complete relation to the subject-matter. Mozart often enlivens you with a story by-the-way, but he always manages to preserve the continuity of his material. The difference between his method and that of Brahms, for example, is like that between Fielding’s philosophic interlude chapters in “Tom Jones” and Meredith’s “Our Philosopher,” who, looking down from an impersonal height upon the characters in the story, interjects his Olympian comment.
A new and terrific force entered music through Beethoven, new to music, old as the human race—namely, the spirit of revolt. The world is always the same. In its fundamentals, human life, within our historical retrospect, remains what it was. An art takes what it can master—and no more. Music was ready; the world was in a turmoil at just that moment, and the result was what we call “Beethoven.” Mozart was his dawn, Schumann and the other Romanticists his mysterious and beautiful twilight. He himself represents at once the spirit of revolution, that inevitable curiosity which such a period always excites, and that speculative philosophy which tries to piece the meaning of new things. The world was full of flame; battle thundered only a few miles from Vienna; the spirit of equality and fraternity was hovering in the air. Beethoven’s piercing vision compassed all this. He sounded the triumph of the soul of man—as in the great theme at the close of the Ninth Symphony; he took the simplest of common tunes and made it glorious—as at the end of the “Waldstein” Sonata; his imagination ranged at will over men struggling in death-grapple, over the gods looking down sardonically on the spectacle. He was the great protagonist of democracy, but he was also a great constructive mind. He never destroyed anything in music for which he did not have a better substitute, and there is hardly a note in his mature compositions that is not fixed in nature.
This great force having spent itself, the art turns away and starts in another direction—as it must. The lyric symphony of Schubert appears. His was the most perfect song that ever asked for expression by the orchestra. With small intellectual power, with but scanty education of any sort, Schubert, by the very depth of his instinct, creates such pure beauty as to make intellectualism seem almost pedantic. He strings together melody after melody in “profuse, unmeditated art.” He was a pendant to Beethoven, and often enough in listening to Schubert’s music we catch the echo of his great contemporary. Then comes the so-called “Romantic School” of Schumann with its tender, personal qualities, its glamour, its roseate hues. Like all other romantic utterance it had a certain strangeness, a certain detachment from reality, and a certain waywardness which give it a bitter-sweet flavor of its own. Like all other romantic utterance, too, it was impatient and refused to wait the too-slow turning of the clock’s hands; it is the music of youth and of hope. Its effect on the development of the symphony was slight. It was ill at ease in the large spaces of symphonic form, for its hues were too changing, its moods too shifting, to answer the needs of the symphony. No really great symphonic composer appears between Schubert and Brahms, but during that period the rich idiom of the Romantic School had become assimilated as a part of the language of music.
Brahms using something of this romantic idiom, but having a broad feeling for construction, and firmly grounded on that one stable element of style, counterpoint, produced four symphonies worthy to stand alongside the best. They are restrained in style, for Brahms has something of that impersonality which is needed in music as much as in other forms of art (and one may say, in passing, that the greatest of all composers, Bach, is the most impersonal). The flexibility of the language of music increased rapidly during the nineteenth century aided by Wagner and the Romanticists, and in Brahms the symphony becomes less didactic and more introspective. I may, perhaps, make the comparison between music like his and that later stage of the English novel wherein the author desires the action to appear solely as the result of the psychology of the characters, and wherein, also, words are made to answer new demands and serve new purposes. Brahms could not have said what he did say had he been limited to the style of Mozart; nor could Meredith had he been limited to the style of Thackeray. Brahms’s symphonies, in consequence of the complicated nature of his style, are not easily apprehended by the casual listener. Let a confirmed lover of Longfellow, or even of Tennyson, take up for the first time “Love in the Valley” and he will have the same experience. Every word will convey its usual meaning to him, but the exquisite beauty of the poem will elude him. He will go back to “My Lost Youth,” or to “Blow, Bugles, Blow,” for healing from his bruises. Any one of my readers who has access to Brahms’s First Symphony should examine the passage which begins twenty measures before the poco sostenuto near the end of the first movement if he wished to understand something of Brahms’s powers of re-creating his material. Here is a melody of great beauty which is derived from the opening phrase of the symphony, and which has a bass derived from the first theme of the first movement. As it originally appeared it was full of stress as though yearning for an impossible fulfillment. Here its destiny is at last attained, and the law of its being fulfilled. Music progresses from one point of time to another.
Contemporaneous with Brahms stands Tschaikovsky to reveal how varied are the sources of musical expression. No two great men could be farther apart than these—one an eclectic, calm, thoughtful, and impersonal, restraining his utterances in order to understate and be believed; the other pouring out the very last bitter drop of his unhappiness and dissatisfaction entirely unmindful of a world that distrusts overstatement and has only a limited capacity for reaction from a colossal passion. Of Tschaikovsky’s sincerity there is no doubt whatever. He so believed; life was to him what we hear it to be in his symphonies. But life is not like that. If it were we should all have been destroyed long since by our own uncontrollable inner fires. So, aside from any technical considerations,—and he contributed nothing of importance to the development of the symphony,—Tschaikovsky represents a phase of life rather than life itself. Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony adds a new and interesting element to symphonic evolution. Dvořák was like Haydn and Burns, a son of the people, and the themes he employs in this symphony are essentially folk-melodies. But where Haydn merely tells his simple story with complete unconsciousness of its possible connection with life in general, Dvořák sees all his themes in their deeper significance. The “New World” Symphony is a saga retold.
A new phase in the development of the symphony appears in César Franck, whose musical lineage reaches back over the whole range of symphonic development and beyond. His spirit is mediæval. In his one symphony rhythm plays a lesser part, and one feels the music to be quite withdrawn from the vivid movement of life, and to live in a realm of its own. Franck was one of those rare spirits who remain untainted by the world. His symphony is a spiritual adventure; other symphonies are full of the actions and reactions of the real world in which their composers lived. This action and reaction always depends for its expression in music on the play and inter-play of rhythmic figures. Franck’s symphony broods over the world of the spirit; his least successful themes are those based on action.