I
No other European nation can show, within the last fifty years, so great a variety of schools, and so great a variety of effort and achievement within each school, as the German. The reason is that the Germans were the only race that, by the middle of the nineteenth century, had beaten out a musical language that was capable of almost every kind of expression. Within the ample limits of that language there was room for the realization of any spirit and any form—post-classical or progressive, or a union of these two; poetic or abstract; vocal or instrumental; symphonic or operatic. And in each sphere the Germans developed both form and spirit to a point attained by no other nation—in the opera of Wagner, the post-Beethovenian symphony of Brahms and Bruckner, the symphonic poem of Strauss, the song of Hugo Wolf; while within the separate orbit of each of these leaders there moved a crowd of lesser but still goodly luminaries. It is remarkable, too, that each period that seemed a climax of development in this form or that proved to be only the starting-point for a new departure. Beethoven's spirit realized itself afresh in Wagner and Brahms, and in remoter but still easily traceable ways in Liszt and Strauss; in the best of Strauss, again, we can see coursing the sap of Wagner, but with a vitality that throws out unexpected, new and individual shoots; Schubert and Schumann, each seemingly so perfect, so complete in himself, blossom into a new and richer lyrical life in the songs of Hugo Wolf. To make clear the nature and the meaning of the modern German developments it will be necessary to survey rapidly the conditions that led up to them.
Beethoven, especially in his later symphonies, sonatas and quartets, had carried music to an intellectual and emotional height for a parallel to which we have to go back a century, to the colossal work of Bach. Beethoven bequeathed to music an enormous fund of expression and a perfected instrument of expression. Both of these were waiting for the new composers who could use them for the fertilization of modern music. Wagner seized upon the fund rather than the instrument. In place of the latter, though, indeed, with its assistance, he forged a new instrument of his own; but the impulse to the forging of it, and the strength for the forging of it, came to him in large measure from the deep draughts he had drunk of Beethoven's spirit. Schumann (the symphonic Schumann) and Brahms, on the other hand, were more content with the instrument as Beethoven had left it; or, to vary the illustration, they were satisfied, speaking broadly, to fill with more or less derivative pictures of their own the frame that Beethoven had bequeathed to them. But it was inevitable that a procedure of this kind should lead here and there to the petrification of form into formalism, both of idea and of design. For it is an error to suppose, as the writers of text-books too often do, that 'form' is something that can be conveyed by tuition or achieved by imitation. There is no such thing as form apart from the idea; the form is simply the idea made visible and coherent. It is not the form that shapes the thought in the truly great masters; rather is the form simply the expression of the thought, as the form of a tree is the expression of the idea of a tree, or the form of the human body the expression of the idea of man. The post-classicists too often forgot that Beethoven's form and Beethoven's thought are inseparable—that they are, in truth, in the profoundest sense, merely different names for the same thing, the one totality viewed from different standpoints, as we may speak for convenience sake of the bodily man and the spiritual man, though, in truth, the living man is one and indivisible; and the post-classicists, indeed, from Brahms downwards, founded themselves upon the early or middle Beethoven, or even his eighteenth-century predecessors, rather than upon the Beethoven of the last works, with their incessant, titanic struggle to open new roads into art and life. With all his greatness, Brahms was not great enough to be to the symphony of his own day what Beethoven was to the symphony of his. Brahms raises an excellent crop from the delta fertilized by the waters of the great river as it debouched into the unknown sea; but that was all. He himself added nothing to the soil that could make it fertile enough to support yet another generation. All the technical mastery of Brahms—and it is very great indeed—cannot give to his symphonic music the thoroughly organic air of Beethoven's, the same sense of the perfect, unanalyzable fusion of form and matter.
Modern German Symphonists and Lyricists:
Anton Bruckner Felix Draeseke
Hugo Wolf Gustav Mahler
While Brahms was developing the classical heritage in his own way, Liszt and Wagner were boldly staking out claims on the future. With each of these composers the aim was the same—to find a form and an expression that, by their elasticity, would make music more equal to the painting of human life in all its manifold variety. This effort took two lines: the instrumental and the dramatic. Liszt, anticipated to some extent by Berlioz, tried to adapt the essence of the symphonic form to the new spirit. The problems he set himself have rarely been successfully solved, even to the present day; they block the path of every modern writer of symphonic poems, and of every writer of symphonies the impulse behind which is more or less definitely poetic.
The mere fact of the incessant fluctuation of modern composers between the two forms—the one-movement form of Liszt and the symphonic poem in general, and the four-movement form of the poetic or partly poetic symphony—shows that neither of them is of itself completely adequate. For against each of them strict logic can urge some pointed objection. The four-movement form, growing as it does out of the suite, is and will always be more appropriate to what may be roughly called 'pattern-music' rather than to poetic music; for the mere number of the movements, and the practically invariable order of their succession, implies the forcing of the thought into a preconceived frame, rather than the determining of the frame by the nature of the picture. The one-movement form is in itself more logical, but it is always faced by the problem of conciliating the natural evolution of a poetic idea and the decorative evolution of a musical pattern; and the symphonic poems in which this problem is satisfactorily solved might perhaps be counted on the fingers of one hand. There is a point in Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel, for example,
in which we feel acutely that the poetic—or shall we say the novelistic?—scheme that has so far been followed line by line is being put aside for the moment in order that the composer, having stated his thematic material, may subject it, for purely musical reasons, to something in the nature of the ordinary 'working-out.'
The four-movement form obviously allows greater scope to a composer who has a great deal to say upon a fruitful subject, but it labors under an equally obvious disability. The modern sense of psychological unity demands that the symphony of to-day shall justify, in its own being, the casting of it into this or that number of movements. Every work of art must, if challenged, be able to give an answer to what Wagner used to call the question 'Why?' 'Why,' we have a right to say to the composer, 'have you chosen to give your work just this form and these dimensions and no other?' It is because modern composers cannot quite silence the voice that whispers to them that the four-movement form is the form of the suite, in which the charm of the music comes mainly from the delight of the purely musical faculty with itself, rather than a form suited to a music that aims first of all at expressing more definite feelings about life, that they try to vivify the merely formal unity of the suite form with a psychological unity—mainly by means of quasi-leit-motifs that reappear in each of the movements.
But, though this system has given us some of our finest modern works of the symphonic type, it has its limitations. If the composer does not tell us the poetic meaning of his themes and all their reappearances, these reappearances frequently puzzle rather than enlighten us: this is notably the case with César Franck. If the composer works upon a single leit-motif, it is, as a rule, of the 'Fate-and-humanity' type of the Tschaikowsky symphony—a type that in the end becomes rather painfully conventional. This simplicity of plan, however, has the advantage of leaving the composer free to develop his musical material with the minimum of disturbance from the poetic idea. On the other hand, if his poetic scheme is at all copious or extensive, and he allows himself to follow all the vicissitudes of it, he must either give us a written clue to every page of his music—which he is generally unwilling and frequently unable to do—or pay the penalty of our failing to see in his music precisely what he intended to put there; for it is as true now as when Wagner wrote, three-quarters of a century ago, that purely instrumental music cannot permit itself such sudden and frequent changes as dramatic music without running the risk of becoming unintelligible. Always there arises within us, when the composer's thought branches off at an angle that does not seem to us justified by the inner logic of the music quâ music, that awkward question, "Why?" and to that question only the stage action, as Wagner says, or a program, as most of us would say to-day, can supply a satisfactory answer. This conflict between form and matter can be seen running through almost all modern German instrumental music of the poetic order; only the genius of Strauss has been able to resolve the antinomy with some success. None of Beethoven's successors has been able, as he was, to fill every bar of a symphonic composition with equal meaning, or to convey, as he did in the third symphony, the fifth and the ninth, the sense of a drama that is implicit in the music itself, and so coherent, so perspicuous, that words cannot add anything to it in the way of definiteness.