Another great difference between the pre-Romantic and the post-Romantic composers was that the latter were, on the whole, much more cultured men than the former. This was due, of course, not to any particular merit of their own, but to the changed social circumstances of the musician. The system of patronage in the eighteenth century, while it undoubtedly helped the musician to develop as a musician, must have retarded his development in other ways. Under that system, where he was often little better than the servant of some aristocrat, he must often have been debarred from studying the world at first-hand, meeting it face to face, looking at it through his own eyes. Neither Haydn [28] nor Mozart, for example, stood on the level of the best culture of the time. The great German historian of music, Ambros, has pointed out how, in Mozart's letters from Italy, the talk is all of the singers and dancers; "he scarcely seems to have noticed the Coliseum and the Vatican, with all that these contain." And Ambros goes on to say that the modern musician reads his Shakespeare and his Sophocles in the original, and knows them almost by heart. He reads Humboldt's Cosmos and the histories of Niebuhr and Ranke; he studies the dialectic of Hegel as well as, or perhaps more than, the art of fugue; and if he goes to Italy he does not trouble himself about the opera, but occupies himself with nature and the remains of classic art. He is, in fact, says Ambros, "Herr Microcosmos." [29]
For a fair picture of the ordinary life of a musician in the house of his patron in the eighteenth century we have only to turn to the Autobiography of Dittersdorf. Among them all, indeed, Gluck and Handel seem to be the only musicians who possessed much culture, [30] and who strike us as
being, apart from music, the intellectual equal of the great men of the time—of Voltaire, Rousseau, Condorcet, Diderot, Lessing, and the rest. There is no evidence that Beethoven was either a man of wide culture, or a respectable thinker outside his own art. It is, indeed, probable that the enormous musical power of many of these men, and the centuries of progress through which they rushed music in comparatively a few years, was due to their being nothing else but musicians, to the concentration of all their faculties, all their experiences, upon the problem of making sound a complete, living, flexible medium of expression. But the later musicians were of another order. The Romantic movement bred a new type of musician. He no longer sat in the music-room of an aristocrat, clothed in the aristocrat's livery, and spun music out of his own inner consciousness. He moved about in the world and saw and learned a good deal. He associated with poets; he frequented the studios of painters. We get men like Hoffmann, at once novelist, painter, musician, and critic; like Liszt, pianist, composer, author; like Schumann, musician and musical critic; like Wagner, ranging greedily over the whole field of human knowledge, and mixing himself up—in more senses than one—with every possible and impossible subject under the sun. I am not using the term in any offensive or disparaging sense when I say that the average modern musician, in matters outside music, is a much better educated and more all-round man than his predecessor; he knows more, sees more, reads more, thinks more. Men like Wagner, Brahms, Richard Strauss, Hugo Wolf, and Bruneau, stand much closer to the general intellectual life of their day than any of the older musicians did to the intellectual life of his day. I am not for a moment contending that they are any greater musicians merely on this account; I simply state it as a psychological factor in their work, as something that determines, to a great extent, the quality of that work, and certainly determines their choice of subjects.
The way it does this is by making them anxious to express in their music all the impressions they have gathered from the world and from their culture. But in order that they might do this, two things were necessary, as we have already seen. The vocabulary of music—its range of melody and harmony—had to be increased, and the capacity of the orchestra had to be enormously developed. It is folly to laugh at the men of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for not getting on further with poetical music. They had not the means at their disposal to do so. Sonata-form grew up to a great extent on the piano and the violin; and the nature of these instruments largely determined what could and should be uttered upon them. It was not till harmony got richer and deeper and fuller, and men had learned to extract all kinds of expression from the orchestra, that programme music in the true sense of the word became possible.
The broad historical facts, then, are that the stimulus to poetic music in the nineteenth century came from the wider education of the musician, the great development of the means of musical expression, and the incessant stimulation of the musician by poetry and literature in general. [31] As we know, the new spirit broke out in three forms—in the highly emotional song of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Franz, and the others; in the poetical music-drama of Wagner; and in the symphonic poems or programme symphonies of Berlioz, Liszt, Tchaikovski, Raff, and a dozen others, leading up to Richard Strauss. Even the men who did not actually dabble much in the last-named form helped the cause of instrumental poetic music in other ways. Schumann, for example, with his poetic little piano pieces, his delicate sketches of character in the Carneval and Papillons and elsewhere, was really following up the same trail as led to Liszt's Mazeppa, Berlioz's Harold en Italie, and Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel.
VII
On two lines of inquiry, then, we have found the case for programme music somewhat stronger than its hasty opponents have imagined. On the one hand, we have seen that when the nature and origin of music are psychologically analysed, there are two mental attitudes, two orders of expression, and two types of phrase, from one of which has arisen absolute, from the other, programme music. On the other hand, we have seen that, from a variety of reasons, programme music could not have been cultivated by the great masters of the eighteenth century who beat out the form of the classical symphony; while its fascination for the modern men is due to its being the only medium of expression for a certain order of modern ideas. It is quite time, then, that not only critics but composers realised that when the brains are out the form will die; that you cannot write a symphony in the form of Mozart or Beethoven unless your mental world is something like theirs, and that if the literary, or pictorial, or dramatic suggestion is all-potent with a composer, it is folly for him to throw it aside, and try, by using a form that is uncongenial to him, to get back into an emotional atmosphere it would be impossible for him to breathe.
The change that came over music about the beginning of the nineteenth century, and that first came to full fruition in Wagner's operas, is best described in the oft-quoted words of Wagner himself, as "the fertilisation of music by poetry." He felt that there was considerable evidence of the action of poetry upon music in Beethoven, though, as can be seen from the passages on the Leonora overture already quoted, in Beethoven the reins are still too tightly clutched by absolute music. He always, no matter what the origin of his conceptions may have been, worked them out within the limits of symphonic form. Berlioz, roughly speaking, went the other way, always keeping his eye fixed intently on the lines of his poetic scheme. Wagner's criticism upon this practice of Berlioz is interesting, even if not final. In listening to music of this kind, he says, "it always happened that I so completely lost the musical thread that by no manner of exertion could I re-find and knit it up again." His point was this, to put it in words of our own: if he was listening to a Berlioz work, he could not get complete pleasure out of the music, as mere music, because it was not developed along purely musical lines; the chief theme, let us say, gave him pleasure on its first announcement, but he could not see the rationale of its future treatment, as one can always see the rationale of the return of the themes in a symphony. This was because the course of the music was determined not by abstract musical intentions, but by poetic intentions which were not made clear to him; and the result was, as it were, that he fell between two stools. "I discovered," he says, "that while I had lost the musical thread (i.e. the logical and lucid play of definite motives), I now had to hold on to scenic motives not present before my eye, nor even so much as indicated in the programme. Indisputably these motives existed in Shakespeare's famous balcony scene" (Wagner is speaking of Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet); "but in that they had all been faithfully retained, and in the exact order given them by the dramatist, lay the great mistake of the composer." And Wagner's contention was this, that when a composer wants to reproduce in music a certain scene from a drama, he must not take the thing as it stands and move on from point to point in exactly the same way as the poet did. What was right for the poet would be wrong for the musician. He must tell his story or paint his scene according to the laws and capacities of music, not those of poetry; and Wagner goes on to praise Liszt for having, by superior artistic instinct, avoided the pitfall that nearly proved fatal to Berlioz. Liszt, instead of trying to tell us in music precisely what the poet had already told us in verse, rethinks in music what the poet has said, and gives it out to us as something born of musical feeling itself.
Now we need not go into the question of how far Wagner is right in what he says of Berlioz. This, at all events, is certain, from his own words in praise of Liszt, that Wagner had no à priori objection to the symphonic poem, but only to the symphonic poem when it went on what he took to be the wrong lines. All that is needed is for the proper compromise to be agreed upon between the poetic purpose and the musical form. This, I think, Richard Strauss has effected, and it would be interesting to have had Wagner's criticism of Strauss. But since we cannot get that, we may criticise Wagner from the standpoint of the symphonic poem.