[33. ] Many utterances of German poets to this effect will be found reproduced in Chamberlain's Richard Wagner.
If the drama longed for the means of expressing its own inmost nature, no less did music seek for a nearer approach to objectivity and to the conditions of human existence. If it is true that music is the root of all the arts, then it must also be the root of human life, and must seek to reveal itself in life and in the drama which is the mirror of life. The desire for human expression is already, as we have seen, very clearly discernible in the symphonies and sonatas of Beethoven, but it is since his time that the most remarkable development has taken place. The programme music of Berlioz, Liszt, and other composers has rightly been condemned by many critics, but the mistake was in the manner of the composition rather than in the intention, which was natural, indeed inevitable. Wagner's assertion that with Beethoven "the last symphony has been written"--rationally understood, of course, as meaning that nothing beyond is possible on instrumental lines--is quite true. There was nothing left but for music to take form in things of human interest. Only the composers, perhaps as much from want of an adequate dramatic form as from want of skill, failed to attain their end. While evidently striving to follow out Beethoven's hint, mehr Ausdruck der Empfindung als Malerei, their powers failed, and they produced more Malerei than Empfindung. The reader may consider by the light of these remarks the passage in Liszt's Faust symphony in the slow movement, where Gretchen is represented as plucking a daisy, repeating, "He loves me, he loves me not," etc. The composer has depicted the scene with wonderful skill and exquisite poetic feeling, but the essence of Goethe's scene, which lies entirely in its unconscious innocence, is gone in this highly wrought artificial presentation. It is the difference between nature and art, between the naïve, pure-minded maiden and the actress painted and decorated for the stage.
There are few persons, I believe, who on hearing an instrumental composition do not feel a desire to form a mental picture of its contents, so to speak, to objectivate it in their minds. Aestheticians tell us that we are wrong, and we are apt to laugh at each other's pictures, but we all do it. Beethoven, as we know from his friend Schindler and his pupil Ries, often, if not always, had some object before him when composing his instrumental works. The fact that the same music suggests different interpretations to different minds will not disturb us if we remember that music does not and never can depict or describe its object: for that we have the arts of poetry and painting. What music can give is the emotional mood which it calls forth, and which may be common to many objects very different in their external character. A "stormy" movement may be referred to a storm of winds and waves, or to a storm of human passions, and so might suggest a battle, a shipwreck, a revolution, a violent emotion of love or hatred, or a play of Shakespeare. But the aversion which we naturally feel to the labelling of sonatas and symphonies with titles is in my opinion justifiable,[[34]] because here we recognize an attempt to stereotype one particular interpretation, instead of leaving the mind of each hearer free to form his own.
[34.] The latest and most atrocious outrage on good taste in this respect is the labelling of Beethoven's great B flat sonata as "the Hammerklavier." All musicians of finer feeling should unite to kill this absurd name.
A musical composition is a vessel into which many wines can be poured. It cannot in itself express either any material object or any definite feeling which involves such an object. No music can alone, without a suggestion from elsewhere, express a person, a place, or love or fear or a battle or "a calm sea and prosperous voyage," or any similar thing. But it has a marvellous power of receiving suggestions which are offered to it, by words or otherwise, of carrying them on and, by means of its own forces of movement and proportion, intensifying their expression to, a degree inconceivable without its aid. Mathematics present an exact analogy to music, and are to science what music is to art. Both are ideal forms which in one sense only attain complete individuality when they are pure, but in another sense have no meaning until they are applied to some object of nature. A mathematical formula is only true so long as it remains an ideal in the mind; but its existence has no other purpose than to state a law for material phenomena, when it at once loses its essential qualities as a mathematical formula, certainty and accuracy. In this way we may understand simultaneously the supremacy of absolute music and the truth for which Wagner contends, that music can never be anything but expression.
Dr. Hanslick's dictum that music has no other means for its expression than movement and symbolism cannot be admitted. It can express through association. All the senses have in some degree the faculty of recalling in the mind impressions with which they have once been associated. Who has never had the memory of his home or of some place familiar to his childhood recalled by the scent of a flower or a plant? No sense possesses this power in anything like the same degree as that of hearing, especially when the connection has been established through a musical strain. It is on this principle that Wagner mainly relies in his dramatic musical motives. In itself the connection is in the first instance artificial. A musical strain of a striking individual character is brought into connection with some idea of the drama, it may be a person or a scene or an incident, in short, anything which may serve as a dramatic motive, and thenceforward whenever the musical strain is heard, the idea with which it has been associated will be called up in the mind of the hearer. All the resources of modern music are then at the disposal of the composer for exhibiting his motive in the most varied lights, intensifying, varying, contrasting, or combining with other motives, as the dramatic situation requires.
It often happens that the musical strain is heard before its association with an idea of the drama has been established, as, for example, in the instrumental prelude. The idea then seems to hover in the music as a vague presentiment (Ahnung) of something that is to come. A superb example of this occurs at the end of Die Walküre. Wotan has laid his daughter to rest, and surrounded her with a barrier of fire. "Let none cross this fire who dreads my spear," he cries, and at once the threat is answered by a defiant blast from the trombones uttering a strain which has not yet taken definite form, but which we learn from the sequel is the theme proper to Siegfried the hero, who is destined to bring to an end the power of the god.
Or the motive may reappear after it has served its purpose on the stage; it is then a reminiscence of past events. No finer example of this could be found than in the music of Isolde's swan-song, the so-called Liebestod, which is built up out of the motives of the life into a symphonic structure of almost unparalleled force and truth.