It is possible enough that an audience may enjoy having commonplaces vociferated at them with orchestral accompaniment; but this is nothing. To the musician the poet will say that he is surprised to find a term which is considered a reproach in poetry esteemed as the expression of the best means of its interpretation. To call a poem declamatory or rhetorical is to condemn it; and music is naturally less rhetorical than speech; so that in a declamatory interpretation of poetry Music would seem to abnegate its own excellence for the sake of a quality foreign to itself and repudiated by the art which it is seeking to heighten.
He will not be satisfied by the assurance that the method will serve to introduce and explain poetry to some people who are generally indifferent to it; it will seem to him that the musician is laboring to introduce into pure vocal music the old dramatic crux,—that awkwardness from which it has, in its best forms, been beautifully free. Because in the musical drama that must be sung which should be spoken, why try to make that seem to be spoken which should be sung?
ANALYSIS OF ODE.
This analysis is taken from the concert programme:—
I. An invitation to Music to return to England: that is, in the sense that England should be again pre-eminent for music above other European nations, as she was in the sixteenth century. The three English graces are Liberty, Poetry, and Music.
II. Music invited in the name of Liberty: the idea associated with the forest.
III. Music invited in the name of Poetry: the idea of Poetry associated with pastoral scenes and husbandry.
IV. The Sea introduced as the type of Love; isolating our patriotism, and making our bond with the rest of the world.
V. The national intention gives way to wider human sympathies. Music here considered as the voice of Universal Love, calling and responding throughout the world. A national meaning also underlies, in respect of our world-wide colonization.