FIGURE XXIX. THE BIRD-NOTES IN THE PASTORAL SYMPHONY.
It is only necessary to play the bird-notes alone, omitting the supplementary phrase, to see how much of the effect is a matter of pure music. And that Beethoven realized this himself, that he was clearly aware that music affects us more by setting up vague but potent emotions in us by means of a beautiful embodiment of expressive sounds than by merely copying what is in the actual world, is evidenced by the motto he inscribes at the head of his score: “Mehr Ausdruck der Empfindung als Malerei”—“More the expression of feeling than painting.” Even more succinct, if that is possible, is a note in one of his sketch books: “Pastoral Symphony: no picture, but something in which the emotions are expressed which are aroused in men by the pleasure of the country.”
This attitude of Beethoven’s towards program music, both in practice and in theory, is but a crucial and striking example of his general attitude towards music, an attitude produced both by the tendencies of the historic moment and by his native genius. Had he had less capacity or taste for expression of the most definite and vivid emotions, he would not have been able to carry music beyond the formalism of Haydn and Mozart, and to make it voice the self-conscious idealism, the romantic intensity, the various, many-sided, and profound spiritual life, of modern men. Had he not, on the other hand, clung pertinaciously to the plastic beauty which, after all, is the most indispensable quality of musical art, had he allowed his interest in the characteristic to betray him into literalism, he would have deprived music of that period of full maturity which he represents, and ushered in too soon the inevitable decadence, in which art is no longer whole and balanced, but seeks special effects and particular expressions, becomes meteoric, dazzling, and fragmentary. That period was bound to come, as the parabola must make its descending as well as its ascending curve, or the plant have its autumn as well as its spring and summer. But before the appealing, but pathetically incomplete work of the romanticists came to give a sort of Indian summer brightness to the musical year, it was meet that it should have its full harvest of ripe, sound, and wholesome beauty. And this it had, in the incomparably sane and noble works of the mature Beethoven.
FOOTNOTES:
[44] “Representative Men,” Riverside ed., p. 182.
[45] See Chap. III., p. 118.
[46] See Chap. V., p. 199.