Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde": An Essay on the Wagnerian Drama

by George Ainslie Hight

"Art generally ... as such, is nothing but a noble and expressive language, invaluable as a vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing.

"Art, properly so called, is no recreation; it cannot be learned at spare moments, nor pursued when we have nothing better to do. It is no handiwork for drawing-room tables, no relief of the ennui of boudoirs; it must be understood and undertaken seriously or not at all. To advance it, men's lives must be given, and to receive it, their hearts."

These words, among the first written for serious publication by John Ruskin when he was a young graduate of Oxford, are the text of his whole life's teaching.

"Daily and hourly," writes Carlyle, "the world natural grows out of a world magical to me.... Daily, too, I see that there is no true poetry but in reality."

More than two thousand years before Plato had written in the third book of his Republic against the indifference to manly virtue and the cult of a languishing effeminacy in the poetry and art of his day. He inveighs against the [Greek: panarmonia] and [Greek: poluchodia] of the musicians, by which we may understand over-instrumentation,--as if the Athenians even then had their Berliozes and Strausses--and continues (I quote from Jowett's translation): "Neither we nor our guardians whom we have to educate can ever become musical until we and they know the essential forms of temperance ([Greek: so¯phrosunae]), courage, liberality, magnificence ([Greek: megalorepeia]), and their kindred, etc."

The teaching of all these three great masters, and I might have multiplied quotations from the works of the greatest--but only from those of the greatest--thinkers of ancient and modern times, is the same: that art is not a mere play of beautiful forms, but that the artist must know a truth and have been able to express it; that his work must be approved or condemned according as that truth is healthful or the reverse. It is the doctrine of sincerity, and is opposed to the common and weaker doctrine of "art for art's sake"--i.e. that art is self-contained, that we occupy ourselves with it solely for the pleasure which it affords through our senses, that it has no didactic purpose. By this latter view, beauty in art is an idea quite distinct from utility or morality; by the other, beauty, utility, and morality are fundamentally one, being all emanations from the one supreme Idea of creation named by Plato--"the Good," or "the Good in itself," "the Idea of Good."

Can we apply this distinction to music? All the other arts derive their subject-matter from the material world, but Polyhymnia seems to detach herself from her sisters, to soar away from the things of this earth, and to dwell in the ethereal regions of pure ideality. The objects of painting, poetry, sculpture, etc., are those of our surroundings; the artist only puts the things familiar to us in nature in a new light, and, by concentrating the attention upon certain aspects, reveals much that minds less poetic than his had not noticed before. The morality which these arts are able to convey is the morality of nature. But music is not concerned with any material objects; its means are rhythm, melodic intervals, harmony, all purely ideal existences, and seemingly all connected in some mysterious way with number, itself an immaterial idea of time. And although the manner of our perception of harmony has, to some extent, that of melody to a still smaller extent, been explained in our time by physiologists, the explanations only relate to the form of our perception. They show how, through the harmonic overtones, the mind is able to recognize the connection between a chord and the one which preceded it, but cannot tell why one progression of harmonies is pleasant, another the reverse, as Helmholtz himself was fully aware. How then can it be possible for music to be a vehicle of thought? What can it have to do with "temperance, courage, liberality"?

The question is not one which I can hope fully to answer within these pages, but it cannot be altogether passed over; we must know something of the nature of music, must have some clear notion of what it is if we are to understand its relation to language in the drama. The explanation given by Leibnitz that it is an exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi is quite inadequate. Music is not a purely intellectual affection like that of number and proportion, but is in the highest degree emotional. The pleasure which we receive from contemplating a mathematical process of great complexity is altogether different from that of music. Highly complex as are the mathematical relations of the vibrations which convey musical tones from the instrument to the ear the final result of those relations, the impression on the rods of Corti's organ in the Cochlea, are as purely physiological as the impressions of touch. Scientific, i.e. inductive, research must always find an end at the point where the organs become too small for observation; it can throw no light on the nature of the impression transmitted from Corti's organ to the consciousness.

A suggestion has been put forward by Schopenhauer which may be viewed as an attempt to explain transcendentally the nature of music. It is well known that, according to Schopenhauer, a work of art represents the (Platonic) Idea of the object which it depicts, this Idea being itself the first and highest stage of objectivation of Will. Music is, however, a direct objectivation of Will, i.e. not through an Idea.

Music, therefore, is not like the other arts the image (Abbild) of an Idea, but an image of the Will itself, of which the Ideas are also the objectivity. This is why the impression which music makes upon us is so much more powerful and more penetrating than that of the other arts, for they tell only of the shadow, music of the substance. But inasmuch as it is the same will that objectivates itself, only in quite different ways in the Ideas and in music, so there results, not indeed a resemblance, but rather a parallelism, an analogy between music and the Ideas which appear in the world, multiplied and imperfect as phenomena.