Program music differs from pure music in being aimed rather at the literal imitation or delineation of objects and events in the natural world than at the presentation, through orderly and consequently beautiful tone-combinations, of the general emotions that they arouse. Schütz, a very early German composer, depicting by a long downward scale an angel descending from heaven; Beethoven, introducing the notes of the nightingale, quail, and cuckoo in his Pastoral Symphony; Schubert, writing in the accompaniment of his song, “The Trout,” a leaping figure suggestive of the motions of the fish in the water; Raff, sounding the rhythm of a galloping horse all through the ride-movement of his Lenore Symphony: Wagner, imitating in the “Waldweben” the murmurings of the forest; all these composers are writing program music. Of course there is no reason that program music should not be at the same time pure music, provided that the desire to imitate nature accurately does not lead the composer to slight the requirements of plastic beauty in the ordering and combination of his material. A portrait may be good decoration, if composition, massing, light and shade, coloring, and so on, are not sacrificed to a pitiless realism. Just so, program music can be made beautiful, if the needs of abstract tonal beauty are duly considered.
But as a usual thing they are not. The program composer generally makes a fetish of his “idea,” pursues it with the enthusiasm of the literalist, and quite neglects the formal symmetry, the stylistic congruity and harmony, of his web of tones. The result is that program music is as a rule more interesting than moving; that in attempting to make pure sounds do what words, or even colors and shapes, can do better, it sacrifices the legitimate and characteristic effect of tones—the suggestion of a general state of feeling, potent by reason of its very vagueness, and transfigured by the abstract beauty of its medium.
Now Beethoven was obliged in his early maturity to face and solve this problem of program music for himself. His intense individualism, his susceptibility to strong feeling, his natural interest in the characteristic, the dramatic, the definite, and the opportunity he found, in music as he received it from his forerunners, for a more detailed expressiveness than had yet been attempted, all inclined him to take the attitude of the program composer. The poetic conception of a work was so clear and distinct in his mind that he could easily assign it a descriptive title. He called his third symphony “The Eroica,” his sixth the “Pastoral,” and said that the motif of the fifth indicated “Fate Knocking at the Door.” He called one of his piano sonatas “Les Adieux, l’Absence et le Retour;” of another, that in G-major, Opus 14, he said, “It is a dialogue between husband and wife, or lover and mistress; between the entreating and the resisting principle;” he tacitly admitted that the sonatas in F-minor, Opus 57, and in D-minor, Opus 29, were illustrative of Shakespeare’s Tempest. Other works, not specifically named by him, wore very naturally titles given by others: as the “Pastoral Sonata,” the “Moonlight Sonata,” and the “Sonata Appassionata.” At the same period that he was writing these instrumental works with programmistic aspect, he wrote also his incidental music descriptive of Goethe’s “Egmont,” his overture on the subject of “Coriolanus,” and his single opera, “Fidelio.” Of interpretation he said:
“Though the poet carries on his monologue, or dialogue, in a progressively marked rhythm, yet the declaimer, for the more accurate elucidation of the sense, must make cæsuras and pauses in places where the poet could not venture on any interpunctuation. To this extent, then, is this style of declaiming applicable to music, and it is only to be modified according to the number of persons cooperating in the performance of a musical composition.”
Yet in spite of all these indications of the direction in which music was moving with Beethoven, his instinct for beauty kept him from allowing mere delineation to become his ideal. As Sir Hubert Parry well says, the Pastoral Symphony is like a manifesto on that point. Of all Beethoven’s works, it ventures farthest into the domain of program music. It contains actual imitations of sounds and sights in nature, as the rippling of the brook (strings); the muttering of thunder (contrabasses in their low register); flashes of lightning (violins); the bassoon of an old peasant sitting on a barrel, and able to play but three tones; and the song of the nightingale (flute), quail (oboe), and cuckoo (clarinet.) All the movements bear descriptive titles, as follows: “The awakening of happy feelings on arriving in the country; Scene by the brook; Merry gathering of peasants; Thunderstorm; Shepherd’s song—Rejoicings and thankfulness after the storm.” It is obvious that here Beethoven was pushing the descriptive power of music to its limits. Yet it is important to note that even here neither his instinctive sense of the proper uses of the musical art nor his reasoned conviction as to the nature of musical expression forsook him. Throughout the growlings of the thunder, the music pursues its way coherently and accordingly to its own laws. The rhythmic scheme and the harmonic sequence are maintained, and the general structure is not for a moment forgotten. After the imitation of the bird-notes, in the second movement, the musical sentence is rounded out to completion by the lovely concluding phrase, imitated by various instruments. (See Fig. XXIX).
