[9] I stated in the first chapter what justification there is for using the word “intellectual” in regard to music, and I speak here of thought in that sense.
[10] As examples of melodies with finely adjusted rhythms I may cite the theme of the slow movement of Beethoven’s pianoforte sonata, opus 13, and that of the slow movement of Brahms’s pianoforte quartette, opus 60.
[11] In the “wood-wind” group, so called, there are flutes, oboe, clarinets, bassoons, English horn, etc.; in the brass, there are trumpets, French horns, trombones, tubas, etc.
CHAPTER VII THE SYMPHONY (continued)
I. THE UNITY OF THE SYMPHONY
For the ordinary listener to a symphony the one great difficulty lies in “making sense” out of it as a whole. He enjoys certain themes and is, perhaps, able to follow their devious wanderings, but he retains no comprehensive impression of the symphony as a complete thing, and he may even never conceive it as anything more than a series of interesting or uninteresting passages of music. Now, it is obvious that an art of pure sound, if it is to have any significance at all, must have complete coherence within itself, and that the longer the sounds go on the more necessary does this coherence become. This is, of course, the problem of all music. Even opera must have a certain musical coherence, for it cannot depend entirely on being held together by the text and action; even the song must make musical sense in addition to what sense (by chance) there is in the words. Give what glowing, what romantic, even what definite title you will to a piece of programme music,—call it “The Hebrides,” or “Death and Transfiguration,” or descend to such a title as “A Simple Confession,”—you must still give your music coherence in itself. As a matter of fact, the titles of pieces of programme music do not lessen the composer’s responsibilities in the least, and there is no fine piece of such music in existence that does not obey the general laws of form as applied to music. The title is, after all, merely a suggestion, an indication, an atmosphere. Schumann’s “The Happy Farmer” is merely jolly; it is not even bucolic, and you hunt for the farmer in vain; “Träumerei” is made rhythmically vague in order to create the illusion of reverie, but has, nevertheless, complete musical coherence; “Tod und Verklärung” of Strauss contains no evidence of sacrificing its form to its so-called “subject,” and the Wagnerian leit-motif is suggestive and not didactic.
The development of form in the symphony is too large a subject to be covered here, but there are certain fundamental aspects of it upon which I may dwell with safety, since they obey laws which apply everywhere. To make clear what I mean let me say that an art whose fundamental quality is movement must have for its problem the disposition within a certain length of time of a certain group of themes or melodies. The distinction between this art and that of painting is that in music the question is “When?” in painting “Where?” In this sense literature is nearer music than is painting, and I shall shortly point out some analogies between literary and musical forms. I stated in the first chapter the fundamental synthetic principle of music, which is that no one series of sounds formed into a melody can long survive the substitution of other series, unless there be given some restatement, or, at least, some reminder of the first. There is no musical form that does not pay tribute directly or indirectly to this principle. And this, much modified by the medium of language, applies also to literature. Most novels contain near the end a “looking backward over traveled roads”; a too great digression from any thesis requires a certain restatement of it. The first appearance of Sandra Belloni is heralded by her singing in the wood near the Poles’ country house. The epilogue to “Vittoria” closes with the scene in the cathedral: “Carlo Merthyr Ammiani, standing between Merthyr and her, with old blind Agostino’s hands upon his head. And then once more, and but for once, her voice was heard in Milan.” The unessential characters and motives of Sandra Belloni disappear in “Vittoria”—Mrs. Chump, an unsuccessful essay in Dickens, finds a deserved oblivion; so do the “Nice Feelings” and the “Fine Shades”; but the presence of Merthyr in the cathedral is as necessary to that situation as is the absence of Wilfred. “War and Peace” would be an inchoate mass of persons, scenes, and events, were it not for certain retrospects here and there which hold the whole mass together. “The Idiot” is a striking illustration, for the early part of Mishkin’s career only appears in the sixth chapter, as if to tide over more successfully the vastness of the scheme; and the final chapter brings back most vividly the experiences of his boyhood. The sonnet is the most concise example of this process, and I do not need to dwell on the precision with which it illustrates it.
One great difference exists, however, between music and literature, and that is in the number of its subjects or characters. “War and Peace,” to take an extreme example, contains scores of characters, while a whole symphony would usually contain not more than twelve or fourteen themes. The prime reason for this is that themes have no established law of association, and so do not represent something else with which we are already familiar as do names of persons in books. We remember the names of such characters as Joseph Andrews or Tom Jones, or even Dr. Portsoaken, for, although they lived a long time ago, we have enough word association to contain their names and we can understand them and can follow the devious courses of their adventures and the philosophy of life they represent. (The absence of this association makes it difficult for us to remember the characters in Russian novels.) When we hear a musical theme, however, we have to remember it as such.