Compare with music of this kind the phrases of a highly expressive modern song, or of such a piece as Wagner's Faust Overture, or of one of Liszt's or César Franck's symphonic poems. Here the inspiration comes direct from some aspect of external nature or from some actual human experience; and the musical phrase becomes correspondingly modified. While there still remain (1) the physiological pleasure in the theme as sound, and (2) the formal pleasure in the structure, balance, and development of the theme, there is now superadded a third element of interest—the recognition of the veracity of the theme, its appropriateness as an expression of some positive, definite emotion, something seen, some actual experience of men. And music with a content of this kind, it is important to note, can depart widely from the manner of expression and of development of absolute music, and still be interesting. The proof of this is to be had in recitative. Here there is a very wide departure from the more formal music in every quality—melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic. Attempt to play an ordinary piece of recitative as pure music, without the voice and without a knowledge of the words, and its divergence from music of the self-sufficing order generally becomes obvious. The justification of recitative is to be sought not in its compliance with the laws that govern pure non-dramatic instrumental music, but in its congruence with a definite literary idea that is seeking expression through the medium of tone; and our tolerance of it and appreciation of it are due to this supplementing of the somewhat inferior physical pleasure by the superior mental pleasure given by the sense of dramatic truth and fitness. So again in the song. Let any one try to imagine how little the ending of Schubert's Erl-King would suggest to him if he were totally ignorant of the words or the subject of the song, and he will realise how the literary element at once modifies and supports music of this kind. As a piece of absolute music, the final phrase of the Erl-King means nothing at all; it only acquires significance when taken in conjunction with the words; and the justification of its relinquishment of the mode of expression of pure self-sufficing music is precisely its congruence with the literary idea. To go a step further, the phrases typical of Mazeppa in Liszt's symphonic poem, both in themselves and in their development, would probably puzzle us if we met with them in a symphony pure and simple; they only become such marvels of poignant and veracious expression when associated in the mind with Mazeppa. And, to go still further, and to show not from the structure of a theme but from the treatment of it the change that may be induced by a "programme," I may instance the repetitions in the last movement of Tchaikovski's "Pathetic" Symphony, which, though unwarrantable in a symphony of the older pattern, seem to many of us surcharged with the most direct psychological significance. Right through, from recitative to the symphonic poem or the programme symphony, we see that the fusion of the literary or pictorial with the musical interest necessarily leads to a modification of the tissue of the musical theme and of the musical development. You could not, if you would, express the story of Mazeppa in such phrases as those of the "Jupiter." So that, while we thus have an a priori justification of the programme phrase, we begin to understand the difficulties that attend programme development, and some reasons for its many failures in the past. Much of the work that had been done by the older men in consolidating and elaborating the form of the symphony was found to be of little help to the new school. A new type of phrase had to be evolved, and with it a new method of development.

No one, I think, will dispute the broad truth of the principles here laid down. That absolute music per se and vocal or programme music per se have marked psychological differences between them, and that, while the older bent was towards the one, the modern men show a marked preference for the other—these are fairly obvious facts. Hence the necessity of urging it upon the classicists that it will not do to apply the formal rules of the old music to the new en bloc, as if they were equally valid in both genres. If the modern men reject the classical forms, and try to produce new ones of their own, it can only be because their ideas are not the classical ideas, and must find the investiture most natural and most propitious to them. When Wagner rejected the current opera-form, and strove to attain congruence of the poetical and the musical schemes at all points of his work, the pedants told him that he avoided the long-sanctioned forms because he could not write in them. They did not see that it would have been much less trouble for him, as a mere musician, to shelter himself behind the old forms than to evolve a consistent new one, and that he aimed at a new structure simply because he had something quite new to say. Similarly, when the pedants lay it down that the programmists choose the programme form because it is an easier one to work in than the absolute form, they fail to see how much originality of mind is needed to get veracity of expression in the song or the symphonic poem, where the work, besides having to satisfy our musical sense, will be tested by the standard of the literary utterance or the literary idea with which it deals.

V

Without making too wide a digression into the æsthetics of music, we can see that the tendency to write the one kind of music is as deeply rooted in us as the tendency to write the other kind. Some musicians, by constitutional bias, take the one route, some the other; but neither party has the right to assume that the kind of music it prefers is the only kind. Hence it is an error to say that music is stepping out of her own province when she becomes programme music. Her real province includes both absolute and programme music; the one is as inherent in us as the other.

But for reasons that will become apparent later, the absolute branch of the art developed more rapidly than the poetical branch. Even by the time absolute music had come to its magnificent climax in Beethoven, programme music had really done nothing at all of any permanent value. Many composers seemed to have a vague idea that purely instrumental music could be made to convey suggestions of real life just as poetry does, and just as the song does; but they had not yet learned where to begin and where to end, what was worth doing in this line and what was not worth doing. Their attempts at programme music were mostly crude imitations of external things, in a language not yet rich enough to express what they wanted to say; they contain, for our ears, rather too much programme and rather too little music. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the minds of the men who tried to write poetic music for instruments alone, ran in two main directions. They either wrote pieces musically interesting in themselves, and gave them fanciful titles, such as "Diana in the wood," "The virtuous coquette," "Juno, or the jealous woman," and so on, or they frankly began with the intention of representing appearances and events in music. Thus in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book we have pieces with the titles, "Faire wether," "Calm wether," "Lightening," "Thunder," and "A clear day." These things were not confined to one country; they are met with all over Europe. Occasionally the programme writers worked through vocal as well as instrumental forms. Muffat wrote pieces of the "Diana in the wood" order. Jannequin described the battle of Malegnano in music, Hermann the battle of Pavia. In the seventeenth century Carlo Farina wrote orchestral pieces in which the voices of animals were imitated. Buxtehude wrote seven klavier-suites, describing in music the nature and quality of the seven planets. Frescobaldi did a battle capriccio. Frohberger wrote a suite showing the Emperor Ferdinand IV. making his way up into heaven along Jacob's ladder. Frohberger, indeed, was realistic beyond the average. He not only painted nature, for example, but indicated the locality as accurately as a geography or a guide-book could do; and it was not merely humanity in general that moved about among his scenes, but the Count this or the Prince that. In some suites, that are unfortunately lost to an admiring world, he painted a storm on the Dover-Calais route, and gave a series of pictures of what befell the Count von Thurn in a perilous journey down the Rhine. [25]

All this seems very crude now, but the very prevalence of the practice points to a widespread feeling in those times that music could be made to serve as an art of representation. Indeed, a much earlier example of this tendency can be quoted, showing that even the ancient Greeks had their programme-music writers. There is a passage in the Geography of Strabo, in which he describes what he heard at Delphi. Here, he says, they had a musical contest "of players on the cithara, who executed a pæan in honour of Apollo. The players on the cithara were accompanied by players on the flute, and by citharists, who performed without singing. They performed a melos (strain) called the Pythian mood. It consisted of five parts—the anacrusis, the ampeira, cataceleusmus, iambics and dactyls, and pipes. Timosthenes, the commander of the fleet of the second Ptolemy, and who was the author of a work in ten books on Harbours, composed a melos. His object was to celebrate in this melos the contest of Apollo with the serpent Python. The anacrusis was intended to express the prelude; the ampeira, the first onset of the contest; the cataceleusmus, the contest itself; the iambics and dactyls denoted the triumphal strain on obtaining the victory, together with musical measures of which the dactyl is peculiarly appropriated to praise and the iambics to insult and reproach; the syrinxes and pipes described the death, the players imitating the hissings of the expiring monster." [26] The unsympathetic may say it is to be hoped that the gentleman was a better admiral than he seems to have been a musician.

But to get back to modern Europe again. These crude imitations of birds and beasts and the rolling of the waves are not programme music; they are the rawest part of the raw material out of which programme music is made. The difficulty is to make the piece interesting both as music, and as a representation of what it purports to describe. A composer may fling a phrase before us and tell us this represents Hamlet, or Othello, or a death-rattle, or the Israelites crossing the Red Sea, or anything else he likes; but unless the phrase has an interest of its own, and unless he can satisfy our musical as well as our literary sense by the way he handles and combines and transforms it in the sequel, he will not arrest our attention. The great problem, indeed, of both the modern symphonic poem and the modern opera is to tell a story adequately and at the same time to satisfy our desire for interesting musical development. If the composer fixes his attention too exclusively on the literary part of his subject, his work will lack organic musical unity; if he is too intent on achieving this, he will probably fail in dramatic definiteness. This, I shall soon try to show, is really the crux both of opera and of programme music; and if we rarely succeed in solving so knotty a problem, it is not to be wondered at that the solution did not come to the men of the sixteenth or seventeenth or eighteenth century.

As a matter of fact, however, one old composer did try to effect a union of the programme purpose with some real sense of musical form. This was Johann Kuhnau (1660?-1722), who, in his six Bible Sonatas, describes "the fight between David and Goliath," "the melancholy of Saul being dissipated by music," "the marriage of Jacob," and so on. Kuhnau was a really remarkable man. He was a good musician who could write interesting clavier-pieces apart from any programme scheme. He was moreover a keen-witted man who tried to think out seriously the problem of the union of musical expression and poetical purpose, so far as any man in those days could do so. In the preface to the Bible Sonatas he points out that the musician, like the poet, prose-writer, and painter, often wants to turn his hearers thoughts in a particular direction. If he wants to express in his music not merely sadness but the sadness of this or that individual—to distinguish, as he says, a sad Hezekiah from a weeping Peter or a lamenting Jeremiah—he must employ words in order to make the emotion definite. But not necessarily, be it observed, by writing the music to the words, as in a song. His own plan is to illustrate his subject in music, and make his poetic purpose clear to us by giving a detailed verbal account of it. Thus he prefaces each of his Bible Sonatas with an elaborate account of the event it deals with, and then summarises the main motives. This, for example, is the summary of the first Sonata, after a long general introduction. The Sonata expresses, he says—

  1. The stamping and bravado of Goliath.
  2. The trembling of the Israelites, and their prayer to God at sight of their awful enemy.
  3. The courage of David, his desire to break the proud spirit of the giant, and his childlike trust in God's help.
  4. The contest of words between David and Goliath, and the contest itself, in which Goliath is wounded in the forehead by the stone, falls down, and is slain.
  5. The flight of the Philistines, and how they are pursued by the Israelites, and slaughtered with the sword.
  6. The jubilation of the Israelites over the victory.
  7. The chorus of the women in praise of David.
  8. And, finally, the general joy, finding vent in vigorous dancing and leaping.