"The poetic subject of a tone piece by Beethoven is thus only to be divined by a tone poet; for, as I remarked before, Beethoven involuntarily appealed only to such, to those who were of like feelings, like culture, aye, well-nigh like capability with himself. Only a man like this can make these compositions intelligible to the laity, and above all by making the subject of the tone poem clear both to the executants and to the audience, and thus making good an involuntary error in the technique of the tone poet, who omitted this indication. Any other sort of performance of one of Beethoven's veritable tone poems, however technically perfect it may be, must remain incomprehensible in proportion as the understanding is not facilitated in the way I have suggested."[373]
This indeed, he held, was Beethoven's error—an error forced upon him by the conditions of his time—that he should endeavour to make his music truly human without giving the hearer the clue to the emotions upon which it was based. Beethoven's mistake, he says, in one of the happiest and most famous of his analogies, was the same as that of Columbus, who, though merely trying to find the way to the India that was already known, actually discovered thereby a new world.[374] His vain effort to "achieve the artistically necessary in the artistically impossible" has, however, revealed to the modern world the infinitely expressive capacity of music. But though it is only by being fertilised by poetry that music can attain to the full expression of the truly human, Wagner, as was to be expected from one who allowed so little liberty to the imagination in art, was against this fertilisation taking the form of programme music. The poetic content must be communicated immediately and visibly to the hearer by presentation on the stage. In all this, of course, he was once more merely expressing an individual bias, and one that is not in the least binding upon musicians in general. When the musician, he tells us, tries to paint by means of the orchestra alone, what he produces is neither music nor a painting.[375] He failed to perceive not only that instrumental music offers numberless instances of quite successful tone painting, but that a good deal of the pictorialism of his own music has to justify itself by means of the imagination alone. Every time the Feuerzauber, for example, is played in the concert room the imagination supplies, quite successfully, the spectacle of the flames; and even in the theatre it is left to the imagination to picture to itself the waves of the Rhine in the opening scene of the Rhinegold, for while the wave music is going on from the commencement the curtain does not rise until the 126th bar. There is no need to elaborate the point. Hundreds of composers, from Bach to the present day, have "painted" in music time without number without the assistance of a stage setting, the subject of the painting being quite sufficiently indicated either by the words of the poem,—the spinning-wheel in Schubert's Gretchen am Spinnrade, for example,—or by means of an explanatory note or title, as with the modern symphonic poem.
Without pursuing this side issue further now, let us follow up the more essential lines of the Wagnerian theory. We have seen him first of all frame his dramatic action in such a way that while making itself fully intelligible to the spectator it supplies the music with endless opportunities for the outpouring of feeling. Romance and "historical" drama have both been rejected because of their containing so much that, according to Wagner, appeals less to the feeling than to the intellect. It was in the myth that he found the condensation he desired. Upon the myth the composer was to pour out the full flood of his emotion. The form and quality of the musical utterance are to be determined by the poem. Lyrism must no longer be imposed upon the drama from without, as in the older opera, but must grow out of the drama as a necessary consequence. It follows that neither the chorus nor any of the characters is to be employed purely for the purposes of concerted music. In the orchestra the musician has at his disposal an instrument of unlimited expressiveness. The orchestra, as Wagner says, has a capacity of its own for speech. In the Beethoven symphony this capacity was developed to such a height as to urge the orchestra to make the vain attempt to deliver a message which from its very nature it was impossible for it to deliver clearly. That message, however, can be précisé by the Word: and the true function of the orchestra is to announce what cannot be conveyed by speech.[376] Its specific meaning can be still further précisé by means of gesture—not the ordinary gesture of the older opera, which derived solely from the dance pantomime, but gesture that is the visible counterpart of the auditory sensation communicated by the orchestra. The range of this kind of gesture is as wide as human emotion itself. Moreover, the orchestra can carry on the action even after speech and gesture have ceased; it can use themes in such a way as to create presentiment, and it can recall the past. The orchestra in fact, is to the drama of the future what the chorus was to the Greek drama,—a totalised individuality apart from, yet intimately bound up with, the separate individualities on the stage. The musical expression will vary in intensity according to the intensity of the situations. The form of the music drama will therefore be a unified one, but one containing the possibility of an infinite variety of expressions; but it will not be permissible to introduce any expression for the mere sake of musical effect; everything must grow spontaneously out of the emotions and situations presented by the poet. The drama can be thoroughly unified by the employment of salient "leading motives";[377] whereas the older opera had no unity at all, but was a mere conglomeration of arias, duets, ensembles, and so on.[378]
XV
It must be clear to almost every reader, after this exposition of Wagner's own views upon music in general and dramatic music in particular, that, paradoxical as it may seem, he was under a life-long illusion as to the nature of his own genius and the origin and significance of his reforms. So far from the poet in him shaping and controlling the musician, it was the musician who led the poet where he would have him go; so far from drama being with him the end and the music the means, it was music that was more than ever the end, to which the drama only served as means; and so far from Wagner being first and last a dramatist, the whole significance of his work lay precisely in the fact that he was a great symphonist. This last conclusion too may seem a paradox; but on a broad survey it will, I think, be seen to be true. It was not for nothing that Wagner always claimed descent from Beethoven rather than from even the greatest of opera writers, such as Gluck and Mozart and Weber. His instinct was a sound one; it was Beethoven's work that he was really carrying on. The whole of his productivity is given us, in essence, in the later stages of the Ring, in Tristan, and in the Meistersinger. It was to achieve such an expression, such a tissue, as this that he had been labouring and experimenting and thinking for nearly thirty years; and what are these works, seen with the historical eye of the twentieth century, but stupendous symphonies for orchestra and voices? He himself always proudly pointed to Tristan as the supremely successful realisation of all his theories as to the expressive capacity and the formal possibilities of music. Very well; Tristan is of all his works the most symphonic, the one that least needs the apparatus of the stage, the one in which the actors could most easily be dispensed with for long stretches of time with the minimum of loss.
I have already pointed out that he was probably the only musician in Europe in the 'thirties and 'forties with an intuition of all that the achievements of the later Beethoven meant for music.[379] All through Wagner's theoretical writings runs the same simile of music as a vast sea, on which Beethoven alone had so far been able to trust himself with any freedom. While the other composers of his day—and indeed of a later day, as the case of Brahms shows—had little idea beyond cruising in Beethoven's track with more or less varied merchandise, Wagner even as a boy saw the infinite wonders that were awaiting the first mariner who should have the courage to leave the shelter of the great bay and adventure out into the unknown main. He knew all that Beethoven had added to German music, the new emotions he had poured into it, the new logic of form with which he had endowed it. He knew also that as much could still be superadded to Beethoven as Beethoven had added to Mozart and Haydn; and the story of his evolution, both as dramatist and musician, is the story of this gradual extension of the borders of the Beethoven territory.
He had in abundance what has hitherto been almost the exclusive possession of the German school of music,—the sense of a far-sweeping logic of form. He had the rigorous, clean-cutting intellect that instinctively makes straight for what is the very essence of form—the spontaneous shaping of an idea, by itself, for itself, into the lines and colours most natural to it. "Swords without blades" was his contemptuous description of the empty rules of "form" that they sell in schools and text-books, much as the chemist sells the dried leaves of flowers. The true artist, he says, is always creating forms without knowing it.[380] His problem was to find the new form that should be as valid for what he had to say as Beethoven's form was for him. No such form was then in existence. In this respect he was far less fortunate than any of his great predecessors or successors; each of them had found his work all the easier in that he began with an inherited form, of opera or of instrumental music, which he simply exploited or expanded according to his necessities. Wagner's glance round upon the music of his day showed him that there was no form that he could take up and patch or hammer into a serviceable instrument. The symphony was not, nor is it yet, a truly logical form. Its divisions, the number of its divisions, the order of its divisions, are all in large part arbitrary and conventional. Within each of the frames made by these divisions it had to submit itself to a more or less formalistic method of procedure that was often at variance with the very nature of the idea. Even Beethoven, giant as he was, could not quite burst the bonds of custom and prescription. Wagner's favourite illustration of the clash that sometimes occurred between the traditional form and a new artistic purpose was the repeat in the Leonora No. 3 Overture. The controlling influence in the evolution of symphonic form had been the dance; the business of music had primarily been to make what variable play it could with certain given thematic figures. But bit by bit there had stolen into instrumental music the desire for more than this—the desire to follow out in tone not the changing aspects of a theme alone but the vicissitudes of a dramatic idea; and composers had long felt that the logic of the latter must be something other than the logic of the former, though as yet they did not quite know how to attain the structure they wanted. The purely thematic working-out aimed mostly at alternation: the dramatic working-out must depend mostly on psychological development. "It is obvious," says Wagner, "that in the conflict of a dramatic idea with [symphonic] form, there must at once arise the necessity of either sacrificing the development (the idea) to the alternation (the form), or the latter to the former.... I once held up Gluck's Overture to Iphigenia in Aulis as a model, because the master, with the surest feeling for the nature of the problem we are now considering, had here so happily understood that he must open his drama with an alternation of moods and their antitheses, in keeping with the overture form, instead of with a development impossible in that form. That the great masters who came after him, however, felt themselves circumscribed by this, we may clearly see in Beethoven's overtures; the composer knew the infinitely richer delineations of which his music was capable; he felt equal to carrying out the idea of development; and nowhere do we realise this more distinctly than in the great Leonora Overture. But anyone with eyes can see precisely in this overture how prejudicial to Beethoven the retention of the transmitted form was bound to be; for who that is capable of understanding such a work will not agree with me that its weakness consists in the repetition of the first part after the middle section, whereby the idea of the work is marred almost to the point of making it unintelligible; and that the more as in all the other parts, and especially at the end, Beethoven is obviously governed simply by the dramatic development? But whoever is intelligent and unprejudiced enough to see this must also admit that this mishap could only have been avoided by forswearing the repetition altogether—which, however, would mean the abrogation of the overture form, i.e. the original symphonic dance form with its mere play of motives (nur motivirte), and the first step towards the shaping of a new form."[381]