(γγ) Thirdly, however, the art of music does not confine itself to this independent position over against that of poetry and the spiritual content of conscious life. It allies itself with a clearly expressed content already completely elaborated by poetry, and as the accompaniment of emotions, opinions, events, and actions. If, however, the musical aspect of such a work of art remains the fundamental and predominant one, the poetry, whether in the form of poem, drama, or any other, has no right to assert an independent claim of its own therein. And as a general rule in this association, of music and poetry the preponderance of one art is injurious to the other. If therefore the text, a poetical creation, possesses a fully independent value of its own, the support to be expected from music should be merely an insignificant one, as we find, for example, was the case with the dramatic choruses of the ancients where the music was nothing more than an incidental accompaniment. If, conversely, the music is composed with a more independent individuality of its own, then the text in its turn should be of a more superficially poetical execution, and should as an independent production confine itself to emotions of a general character and ideas depicted on universal lines. The poetical elaboration of profound thoughts is as little appropriate to a good musical text as is the delineation of the objects of external Nature or descriptive poetry generally. Songs, operatic arias, the texts of oratorios, and so forth may be consequently, so far as the detail of their execution as poetry is concerned, jejune and of a certain degree of mediocrity. The poet must not make his merits as poet too conspicuous if the musician is to find in his text a genuine opportunity. In this respect it is especially the Italians, such as Metastasio and others, who have displayed the greatest skill, while Schiller's poems, which were never written with such an object in view at all, have been shown to be ill adapted and indeed useless for musical composition[411]. In cases where the music receives a more artistic elaboration, the audience understands next to nothing of the text, and this is more particularly so with our German speech and pronunciation[412]. For this reason it is not in the interest of music that the weight of interest should be reposed in the text. An Italian audience, for example, chatters away during the unimportant scenes of an opera, takes refreshment, plays cards, and so on; but the instant an aria of emphatic appeal or an important musical movement begins, every section of it is all attention. We Germans, on the contrary, take the greatest interest in the fortunes and speeches of the princes and princesses of opera with attendants, squires, intimates, and waiting-maids, and we do not doubt there are many among us still who regret the fact, when the singing begins, that the interest is interrupted, and take their refuge in conversation.
In religious music also the text is either for the most part a well-known credo, or a selection of single psalms, so that the words are regarded as merely an incitement to a musical commentary, which possesses an independent style peculiar to itself, that is to say one which not merely is used to expound the text, but which for the most part simply emphasizes the universal character of the content much in the same way that painting selects its material from sacred history.
(b) The second aspect of our present inquiry is that of the distinction that obtains between the way in which the art of music lays hold of its subject-matter as contrasted with the other arts, the form, that is, in which, whether it be as an accompaniment or independently of a given text, it is able to apprehend and express a particular content. As to this I have already observed that music is not only more capable than the other arts of liberating itself from an actual text, but also from the expression of a definite content, in order that it may find its satisfaction in an essentially complete series of combinations, modifications, contrasts, and modulations, which are comprised within the realm of absolute music[413]. In such a case, however, music is empty, without significance, and is, for the reason that one fundamental aspect of art, namely spiritual content and expression, is absent, not really genuine music at all. It is only when that which is of spiritual import is adequately expressed in the sensuous medium of tones and their varied configuration that music attains entirely to its position as a true art, and irrespective of the fact whether this content receives an independent and more direct definition by means of words, or is perforce emotionally realized from the tone music itself and its harmonic relations and melodic animation.
(α) In this respect the unique function of music consists in this, that whatever its content may be it is not so created by the art for human apprehension as though it either was held by consciousness as a general concept is so contained, or as definite external form is ordinarily presented to our perception, or as such receives its more complete reflection in the artistic counterfeit, but rather in the way in which a content is made a living thing in the sphere of the personal soul. To make this essentially veiled life and in weaved motion ring forth through the independent texture of tones, or attach itself to expressed words and ideas, and to steep such ideas in this very medium, in order to re-emphasize anew the same for feeling and sympathy, such is the difficult task assigned to the art of music.
(αα) The life of soul itself is consequently the form in which music is able to grasp its content, and thereby seeks to absorb within itself everything that can generally enter into the shrine of the soul and above all disclose itself under the veils of emotional movement. But from this it necessarily follows that the art of music must not attempt to minister to sense-perception, but must restrict its effort to making soul-life intelligible to soul, whether this is effected by its making the substantive and ideal depth of a content as such penetrate to the very core of soul itself, or by its preferring to disclose the life and motion of a content in the soul of some particular person, so that this inward life of itself becomes its actual object.
(ββ) This abstract inwardness of soul is in the most intimate sense differentiated, under the mode in which music is related to it, by feelings in other words the self-expanding medium of the personal subject, which unquestionably moves in a content, but suffers the same to persist in this direct self-seclusion of the Ego, and in a relation to the Ego, that is, void of externality. Consequently feeling is throughout simply all the envelope of that content, and it is the sphere which is claimed by music[414].
(γγ) It is a province which unfolds in expanse the expression of every kind of emotion, and every shade of joyfulness, merriment, jest, caprice, jubilation and laughter of the soul, every gradation of anguish, trouble, melancholy, lament, sorrow, pain, longing and the like, no less than those of reverence, adoration, and love fall within the appropriate limits of its expression.
(β) Tone as interjection, as the cry of grief, as sigh and laughter, is already, outside the province of art, the most immediately vital expression of soul-conditions and feelings, the ah and oh of the soul. We find in it a self-production and objectivity of soul as such, an expression which stands intermediately between unconscious absorption and the self-return to thoughts ideally determinate, a disclosure, which has no relation to external fact, but is confined to the contemplative state, just as the bird, too, in its song possesses this enjoyment and this production of its inner self.
The purely natural expression, however, of interjections is not as yet music, for though these outcries are no doubt no intentionally articulate sign of ideas as speech is and consequently express no conceived content in its generalized form as concept, but give vent to a mood and emotion in and through tone itself, a state which is reposed immediately in similar tones and opens the heart in the outburst of the same, yet this emancipation is not one which is promoted by art. The art of music must on the contrary bring the emotions into tone relations of definite structure, and wean the expression of Nature of its wildness, its uncouth deliverance, and ameliorate it.
We may perhaps say that interjections constitute the point of departure of music; but it is only music when an interjection in the form of a cadenza, and in this respect it has to elaborate its senuous material artistically in a higher degree than either painting or poetry before it is qualified to express the content of spirit. We shall have to examine later on more narrowly the particular way in which the content of music is worked up to such a pitch of adaptability; at present I will merely repeat the observation that the tones are themselves essentially a totality of differences, which are capable of disuniting and uniting themselves in the most varied kinds of immediate concords, essential discords, oppositions and transitions. To these opposed and united tones, no less than the differentiation of their movements and transitions, their entry, their progression, their conflict, their self-resolution and their disappearance, the ideal character both of this or that content and of the emotions, in the form whereof both heart and soul obtains the mastery of such content, corresponds in closer or more remote affinity, so that the like tone relations, apprehended and informed conformably thereto, disclose the animated expression of that which is present to Spirit as definable content.