Musical Studies

by Ernest Newman

As for "the inherent stupidity of programme music"—to which opinion one critic was led by having, in the innocence of his heart, thought the motive just mentioned signified one thing, while, he afterwards discovered, it signified quite another—I would put it to him that he is never likely to go wrong again over this phrase, and that each time he hears Don Juan he will, to this extent, be nearer seeing what the composer meant him to see than he ever was before. And if he had an equal certainty of the meaning of all the other subjects in Don Juan, would he not then be able to recreate the whole thing in accordance with Strauss' own ideas? And would not all difficulty then vanish, and the "inherent stupidity" seem to be in those who cursed the form because they had not the key to the idea? Let any one listen to Till Eulenspiegel with no more knowledge of the composer's intentions than is given in the title, and I can understand him failing to make head or tail of it. But let him learn by heart the admirable German or English analyses that can now be had in almost any programme-book, and if all does not then become as clear to him as crystal, if then he cannot follow all the gradations of that magical piece of story-telling—well, one can only say that nature has deprived him of the symphonic-poem faculty, just as she makes some people insensitive to Botticelli or Maeterlinck. He does but throw an interesting light on his own psychology; the value of the musical form remains unassailed.

Now why does not Strauss, or any other composer of programme music, spare himself and us all this trouble by showing us, once for all, the main psychological lines upon which he has built his work? The composer himself, in fact, is the cause of all the misunderstanding and all the æsthetic confusion. Nothing could be clearer than the symbolism of the music in Strauss' Don Quixote, when you know the precise intention of each variation; but the fact that Strauss should give the clue to these in the piano duet and omit it all from the full score shows how absurdly lax and inconsistent the practice of these gentlemen is. Also sprach Zarathustra, again, is quite clear, because indications are given here and there of the precise part of Nietzsche's book with which the musician is dealing; while Ein Heldenleben, in the absence of an official "Guide," simply worries us by prompting futile conjectures as to the meaning of this or that phrase. Wagner would not have dreamt of throwing a long work before us, and simply telling us that the subject of it was Parsifal. Why, then, should the writer of symphonic poems expect us to fathom all his intentions when he has merely printed the title of his work? If the words of the opera are necessary for me to understand what was in Wagner's mind when he wrote this or that motive, surely words—not accompanying the music, but prefixed to it—are needful to tell me what was in Strauss' mind when he shaped the violin solo in Ein Heldenleben. If it is absurd to play to me a song without giving me a copy of the words, expecting me to understand the music that has been born of a poetical idea as if it had been written independently of any verbal suggestion, it is equally absurd to put before me, as pure music, an orchestral piece that was never conceived as pure music. If the poem or the picture was necessary to the composer's imagination, it is necessary to mine; if it is not necessary to either of us, he has no right to affix the title of it to his work.

It is curious, again, that people who can defend Wagner as against the absolutists cannot also see that they are implicitly justifying Strauss and his fellows. Thus another critic writes that "Wagner saw that the intellectual idea could not be conveyed by music alone; that together with the colour—the music—must go the spoken word to make clear what was meant." So far, good. But then he quarrels with Strauss for trying to make his themes expressive of something more than music pure and simple, and giving us a programme to help us. Why, where in the name of lucidity is the difference between singing to a phrase of music the words that prompted it, and printing these words alongside the phrase or at the beginning of the score? Does it matter whether the composer writes a love-scene and has the actual words sung by a tenor and a soprano, or merely puts the whole thing on an orchestra, and tells us that this is a scene between two lovers, and that their love is of such and such a quality? For the life of me I cannot see why the one proceeding is right and the other wrong. And once more, if it is essential that we should not be left in the slightest doubt in the case of the opera as to who the protagonists are and what is the nature of their sentiments, it is equally essential, in the case of the symphonic poem, that we should not be left in ignorance of any of the points that have gone to make the structure of the music what it is. No symphonic poem ought to be published or performed without the fullest analysis of it by the composer himself, just as he would never think of publishing the music of his song or his opera without the words. There is no compromise possible. If the song and the opera are legitimate blends of literary ideas and musical expression, so is the symphonic poem, and if the literary basis has to be given us in full in the case of the opera, we equally need it in the other case as completely as it can be set before us. The great trouble is that composers like Strauss so often do neither the one thing nor the other; they neither put their work before us as music pure and simple, nor give us sufficient clue to what the representative music is intended to represent.

And now let me try to show briefly that Wagner misunderstood the meaning of his own reforms, and that the ideal poetic art-form after which he was striving was not the opera but the symphonic poem.

X

To make the following argument clearer I will state its conclusion at once; I am going to try to show that Wagner's own analysis of the natures of poetry, music and drama conclusively proves that if there can be said to be such a thing as the ideal form of art, it is not the opera but the symphonic poem. I am not going to criticise Wagner's theory, except for a moment here and there. I am going to accept it broadly just as it stands, assume it to be perfectly founded on facts and perfectly logical in the bulk of its exposition, and prove from it that he stopped short at the final conclusion—that had he been quite consistent to the end he would have seen, all through his own argument, the finger of demonstration beckoning him on to a point further than that of opera, to a point still higher up the road, where the symphonic poem was awaiting him. And to draw this conclusion I think we do not need to call in the aid of anything but his own words.

In A Study of Wagner (1899) I contended that, owing to the structure of his mind, Wagner was to a large degree insensitive to the charms of poetry purely as poetry and of music purely as music. He did not, that is, and could not, get from poetry or from abstract music the precise sensations, completely satisfactory in themselves, that a lover of poetry or a lover of abstract music would get. Poetry to him had something unsatisfactory, imperfect, incomplete in it, unless it reached out a hand to music; music was similarly defective unless it was born of a poetic stimulus. To dispute this is to be blind to the plain evidence of Wagner's prose works; the mere assertion to the contrary of his more uncritical admirers counts for simply nothing against the numerous passages that can be brought up in proof. Remarks such as this, "What is not worth the being sung, neither is it worth the poet's pain of telling," or this, "that work of the poet's must rank as the most excellent, which in its final consummation should become entirely music," or this, "A need in music which poetry alone can still," or this, "If the work of the sheer word-poet appears as a non-realised poetic aim, on the other hand, the work of the absolute musician is only to be described as altogether bare of such an aim; for the Feeling may well have been entirely aroused by the purely-musical expression, but it could not be directed," [33]—remarks such as these are not to be explained away. Nay, Wagner's very notion of an art-work that should embrace all the arts was a sure proof of there being a specific something in each art to which he was impervious.

This, then, is the prime fact in Wagner's artistic psychology. When a poetical idea occurred to him, it was one that cried out for the emotional colour of music to complete it; when a musical idea occurred to him, it was one controlled and directed from the start by a poetic concept. Hence not only his dramatic work but his theoretical work is simply the expression of this psychological bias. His opponents did him an injustice when they said he worked out certain theories and then wrote operas to illustrate and justify them. The fact was that the theories and the operas were only two branches from the same trunk—not cause and effect, but two effects of the same cause. In the operas and the prose works alike he was simply seeking self-expression. But muddled thinker as I hold Wagner to have been upon most of the subjects his busy brain took up, he was perfectly clear as to what he wanted to do in opera, and what he wanted to say in explanation of it. Even the distressing opacity of his style, that makes the reading of him so severe a trial to one's literary sense, cannot prevent the big outlines of his system standing out in perfect clearness. In that system he thought he had demonstrated three things—(1) that at a certain stage of its evolution poetry has to call in the aid of music in order fully to realise its desires, (2) that music for the same reason has at a certain stage to call in the aid of poetry, and (3) that in the musical drama we get the best powers of music and of poetry exerted to the fullest, and combined in a harmonious whole. (He also held that the scene-painting, the stage-setting, and the gestures of the actors gratified adequately our other æsthetic senses; but we need not concern ourselves with this aspect of his theory here.)

Let me first make it quite clear that Wagner wished to get an ideal musical-poetic art-form by shearing off from music all that did not tend towards poetry, and from poetry all that did not tend towards music. "Unity of artistic Form," he says in Opera and Drama, "is only thinkable as the emanation of a united Content: a united Content, however, we can only recognise by its being couched in an artistic expression through which it can announce itself entirely to the Feeling. A Content which should prescribe a twofold expression, i.e. an expression which obliged the messenger to address himself alternately to the Understanding and the Feeling—such a Content could only be itself a dual, a discordant one. Every artistic aim makes primarily for a united Shape.... Since it is the instinctive Will of every artistic Aim to impart itself to the Feeling, it follows that the cloven Expression is incompetent to entirely arouse the Feeling...." "This," he goes on to say, "This entire arousing of the Feeling was impossible to the sheer Word-poet, through his expressional organ; therefore what he could not impart through that to Feeling, he was obliged to announce to Understanding, so as to compass the full utterance of the content of his Aim: he must hand over to Understanding, to be thought out, what he could not give to be perceived by Feeling." Thus poetry falls to the ground, as it were, between two stools; the poet wants to make a direct appeal to Feeling, but he is partly defeated by having to make this appeal through the medium of words, which are more the organ of Understanding than of Feeling. The one thing to be done, then, is to supply this deficiency of Feeling by a resort to music, whose appeal par excellence is to the Feeling.

But per contra, music itself, as abstract music, is incomplete; because, although it does indeed move us, it leaves us in doubt as to the cause and purpose of the emotion. "If the work of the sheer Word-poet," says Wagner, "appears as a non-realised poetic Aim, on the other hand the work of the absolute Musician is only to be described as altogether bare of such an Aim; for the Feeling may well have been entirely aroused by the purely-musical expression, but it could not be directed." Or, as he phrases it in another place, instrumental music had worked away at its regular sound-patterns until it "had won itself an idiomatic speech—a speech which in any higher artistic sense, however, was arbitrary and incapable of expressing the purely-human, so long as the longing for a clear and intelligible portrayal of definite, individual human feelings did not become its only necessary measure for the shaping of those melodic particles."