If lyrical music is unsatisfactory to these moods of highest vitality and severest demand, realistic music is exasperating, intolerable. When we have nothing better to do it is amusing enough to note the ingenuity with which a composer can introduce the bray of an ass into his delicate tissue of tones, as Mendelssohn does in the "Midsummer Night's Dream Overture," or make three bird-notes sound a harmonic triad as Beethoven does in his "Pastoral Symphony." There is a fascinating technical problem involved in the suggestion of natural noises by musical tones, and when we are indifferent to such technical interests, we may still find diversion in following a series of tonal cues to the events of a familiar story. But when we crave the sublimity of music, when we long to feel once more the thrill of its transcendent beauty, how can we endure to be put off with the barking of a dog, the mewing of a cat, the galloping of a horse, or the crying of a baby? Most program music is incredibly trivial in intention, and gives an impression of maladaptation of means to ends, the former are so elaborate, the latter so paltry and mean. To elicit from a modern orchestra of a hundred instruments a feeble imitation of a battle seems, as some one has piquantly phrased it, "like using a steam-hammer to kill a fly."
We read with impatience the annals of this school. John Mundy, an English composer of the seventeenth century, writes a "Fantasia on the Weather," in four parts: "Faire Weather; Lightning; Thunder; a Faire Day." Adam Krieger, in 1667, composes a four-part vocal fugue "entirely imitative of cats," on a chromatic subject set to the words "Miau, miau." Dussek produces a series of pieces entitled "The Sufferings of the Queen of France," some of which are: "The Queen's Imprisonment" (largo); "She reflects on her Former Greatness" (maestoso); "Her Invocation to the Almighty just before her Death" (devotamente); "The Guillotine drops" (a glissando descending scale); "Apotheosis." We smile patronizingly over these first childish attempts of an art essentially childish. No longer satisfied with such innocent delineations of natural and political history, we must have autobiography, domesticity, and even metaphysics, translated into tones. But will posterity take a truly keener delight in our triumphs of realism than we do in the works of Mundy and Krieger? Already Mr. Arthur Symons, in his essay on Richard Strauss, cries in pardonable irritation: "If I cared more for literature than for music, I imagine that I might care greatly for Strauss. He offers me sound as literature. But I prefer to read my literature, and to hear nothing but music."
Were triviality the only sin of program music we might leave it, without further ado, to the gradual oblivion which overtakes the jejune in art. But, unfortunately, program music not merely bores the music-lover; it does him a positive injury, which criticism ought, so far as it can, to mitigate. By its false emphasis it distracts attention from what music can do supremely to what it can only botch and bungle, brings true masterpieces into discredit with hearers not sensitive or disciplined enough to appreciate them, and plunges the simple into a hopeless æsthetic quagmire. Pitiable is the frequency of such questions, on the lips of aspiring students, as, "Ought I, when I listen to music, to have in mind a series of pictures, or a story?" To judge by the minuteness of its detail the art which beyond all others is great by virtue of indefinite suggestion, and inspires by appealing to faculties far below the level of intellectual consciousness, is to be sadly duped. "We forget," writes Vernon Lee, "that music is neither a symbol which can convey an abstract thought, nor a brute cry which can express an instinctive feeling; we wish to barter the power of leaving in the mind an indelible image of beauty for the miserable privilege of awakening the momentary recollection of one of nature's sounds, or the yet more miserable one of sending a momentary tremor through the body; we would rather compare than enjoy, and rather weep than admire."
The upshot of all this is, that not even in enjoying the novel delights, the picturesque glimpses, and the fancy-provoking allusiveness which romanticism has introduced into music should we give ourselves too unreservedly to what may be, after all, but a partial and limited pleasure. If these things make us indifferent to deeper beauties they do us a disservice. If, however, we can keep, in spite of their seductions, our sense of proportion, our perception of relative values, we shall enjoy them in security. The romantic movement has undoubtedly led to a widening of our artistic sympathies, has enriched our music with new expressive possibilities and technical resources. It has been one of those periods of ebullience, corresponding perhaps in the consciousness of the race to the storm and stress of adolescence in the individual, which are bound to come so long as we are growing. We cannot fully maintain our poise at the very moment in which we are extending our field of experience; periods of conquest must alternate with periods of assimilation; and as in walking we constantly lose our balance in order to progress, so in mental life we willingly forego control until it can supervene on a broader consciousness.
The romantic composers, eagerly developing the expressive possibilities of music, may have forgotten sometimes in their enthusiasm the organic beauty without which music can never wholly satisfy, but nevertheless they have enriched their art. The available resources of music are to-day more various than ever before. Not only have its mechanical facilities been wonderfully perfected by the ingenuity of the nineteenth century, but its potentialities for vivid and detailed expression have been permanently raised by the subjective intentness of the modern temperament. It remains for future composers to make a new synthesis of all these novel elements, and without sacrificing their vividness to impose upon them the ultimate integrity of impression which at present they too often lack. A classical unity and beauty must supervene upon our romantic multiplicity and interesting confusion. Expression, without losing the minuteness that modern speculation has gained for it, must regain something of the classical serenity. We have had already one musician who, profiting by his heritage, has vied with Schumann in versatility and with Bach in intimacy, who has combined in his single mind something of the sensitive sympathy of the romanticists and the rugged power of the classicists. It may be that Brahms but points the way to a music of the future which will be as grand as it is vivid, as universal in scope as it is personal in accent and inspiration, and in which beauty of form and richness of expression will be reunited in perfect coöperation to one great artistic end.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Properly speaking, "form" refers to the molecular constitution of music, to the ways in which relations of pitch and rhythm are manipulated in melody and harmony; "structure" to the molar constitution of music, the subsequent grouping of the melodies into complete pieces. The difference between a sonata, a fugue, and a nocturne is a difference of structure; the difference between a good melody and a bad one is a difference of form.
[2] La Revue Philosophique, Vol. LII.