Studies in Modern Music, Second Series / Frederick Chopin, Antonin Dvořák, Johannes Brahms

by W. H. Hadow

The limit for music, in short, is much the same as the limit for poetry. There is probably no generic type of emotion which the poet would dismiss as unworthy of treatment, but under each genus there are certain specific forms which he would naturally leave untouched as perversions, or degradations. Every normal and healthy instinct may have its artistic expression, no matter how slight or transitory its nature; it is the parodies, the simulations, the abnormal counterparts that afford no material to poet or musician. Schumann's nursery tunes are as delightful as the 'Child's Garden of Verses'; Mr Austin Dobson has not more skill in porcelain than Rameau or Scarlatti or Couperin. If we want romance, there is Chopin; if dance music, there is Strauss; if simple sentiment, there are the best of Mendelssohn's Lieder. Above all, if we must sing something which our audience can follow without thought and at a single hearing, let us discard our second-rate librettists and second-hand composers, and let us turn back to the national songs which have sprung from the very heart of our people. We shall not thereby aid in conferring royalties on writers who had far better be following some other profession: but we shall at least help to purify the atmosphere of contemporary art. There is no more melancholy spectacle of human infirmity than a so-called 'Ballad Concert' of the present day: unless it be the amateur reproductions, where all the faults of a bad system are faithfully copied, and the unconscious burlesque of feeling is itself unconsciously burlesqued.

All music, then, which is worthy of serious regard must be the spontaneous outcome of a natural and healthy emotion. But this is clearly not the last word in the matter: if it were, we should be threatened with the reductio ad absurdum, that all genuine music is of equal value. Nor can the distinction be entirely explained by the fact that some emotional states are deeper and more serious than others: for, in the first place, such a classification of our feelings is almost impossible; and, in the second, even if it were effected, it would carry us but a little way towards a solution. The emotional basis of Beethoven's Eighth Symphony is lighter than that of Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique, but Beethoven's is undoubtedly the greater work. We have, in short, the whole question of formal beauty to discuss, the whole analysis of those intellectual laws on which it has been already suggested that artistic perfection ultimately depends. It must be remembered that music is not only the expression, but the idealisation of feeling, and that its true worth will be largely conditioned by the qualities of abstract beauty which such an idealisation implies.

These qualities may roughly be classified under the two heads of style and structure. By structure in music is meant the general distribution of ideas in a work or movement: the contrast and recurrence of themes, the organisation of the key system, the whole architectural plan which aims at the establishment of coherence and stability. By style is meant the due arrangement of the phraseology; the right melodic curve, the proper degree of richness and transparency in the harmonisation, the feeling for the special capacities of the different voices or instruments. No doubt the two cannot be sharply separated: they are in a great measure interdependent, and are more or less determined by the same ultimate principles. But as complementary aspects they may at any rate be logically distinguished, and in some cases may even suggest different lines of criticism. In some early sonata movements, for instance, the structure is coherent, but the phraseology deficient in force and contrast. In some works of our romantic period the phraseology is admirable, but the importance of key-relationship almost entirely disregarded. It is much the same with a play or a novel; the story cannot be perfectly told unless the characters are perfectly drawn; we may even add, unless the author has entire command of the right word and the telling phrase. But short of this ideal proportion the balance may swing to the side of plot or to the side of characterisation, to boldness of invention or delicacy of treatment. It is only in the greatest work that the form is, on both sides, entirely satisfying.

Now, the highest type of formal perfection which our minds are capable of conceiving, is that of unity in diversity. The discovery of this principle in Nature, as a whole, was the main problem of Greek philosophy; its discovery in different departments of Nature is the entire problem of modern science. Knowledge is the unification of isolated facts under a single law: truth, which is the correlative of knowledge, finds its climax in the existence of law and the inter-relation of facts. More especially is this the case with that particular form of unification which we call organic; that in which the details are absolutely diverse in character, but all play interdependent parts in one single economy. The organism is not only our supreme example of physical structure, it is the type of all human society and all natural order.

Again, our great evolutionist philosopher has told us that an organism must possess three main attributes. First, it must be definite, clear in outline, complete in substance, and filling with unbroken continuity the fixed limits by which it is circumscribed. Secondly, it must be heterogeneous: composed, that is, of a plurality of parts, each of which has its own special function, and no two of which are interchangeable. Thirdly, it must be coherent: holding this plurality in exact balance and equipoise, so that each part, incapable by itself of maintaining the whole body, is yet essential to the due health and efficiency of the others. Illustrations of this principle are the primary facts of biology. They may be traced in steady gradation from the earliest and most rudimentary forms of animal life until they culminate in the ordered complexity of the human frame. And a line of similar development runs through all political history, from the primitive tribe to the communities of our present civilisation.

Mutatis mutandis, this scientific ideal is also the ideal of art. When we speak of a great picture, a great poem, a great novel, we mean one that groups its diverse elements round a central principle, one in which variety is never chaotic and unity never monotonous; one in which every stroke tells and every touch is essential. No doubt, in the representative arts, this principle is qualified by other considerations,—poetry has to criticise life, painting has to represent nature; but in both the element of formal perfection is of vital importance, and in both formal perfection means perfection of organism. A bad composition in pictorial art means one in which some detail can be obliterated without loss to the whole. A bad composition in literature means one which contains superfluous digressions and 'passages that lead to nothing.' Virgil is the great epic artist, Sophocles the great artist in drama, for precisely the same reasons that teach us to see extravagance in Wiertz' scenes from the Iliad, or make us laugh, not without pity, at Nat Lee's Bedlam Tragedy 'in Twenty-five Acts and some Odd Scenes.' Again the flexibility of fine verse simply means the organic inter-relation of different metrical devices. If we examine a dozen lines of Shakespear, or Milton, or Keats, or Tennyson, we shall recognise that their beauty of sound depends partly on the harmonious juxtaposition of words, each of which finds its natural complement in the rest, partly on the varieties of stress which balance and compensate one another throughout the whole. Take away the variety, and we get verse like that of Hoole's Tasso. Take away the compensation, and we get the misshapen prose of Byron's Deformed Transformed.

Lastly, among all arts, it is to Music that the law of organic proportion most intimately applies. In Painting and Literature, an emotional state gives rise to a thought which gives rise to an appropriate form of expression: in Music, the state of emotion gives rise to a melody which is thought and form in one. While, therefore, with the representative arts, we can sometimes criticise the idea and the expression as two separate factors, with Music it is only in the expression that the idea can be ascertained. Again, the musician has a far more opulent command of formal resource than his brother artists. Contrasts of timbre and tone are at least as various as contrasts of colour: the complexity of musical rhythm is far beyond anything that language can achieve; while, in the devices of harmony, and still more of polyphony and counterpoint, the composer occupies a position which is virtually unique in human experience. Hence we may naturally expect that, in their highest development, the style and structure of Music should present the most complete examples of artistic organism: that they should be, as Mr Pater has described them, the perfect type to which it is the glory of other arts to conform.

Before we proceed to test this hypothesis by reference to the practice of the great masters, there is one preliminary consideration on which it is advisable to lay some emphasis. Music assumes so many forms, and is devoted to so many purposes, that it would be idle to expect the same kind of organic perfection in all. The melodies of the dance and the ballad are, for obvious reasons, compelled to a certain uniformity of rhythm and stanza; and it is impossible that they should exhibit the same diversity as a work which is not bound by their restrictions. Again, a continuously recurrent figure may be used with admirable effect in a short pianoforte piece, or in the accompaniment of a song, though it would grow monotonous and wearisome if maintained through the whole length of a symphonic movement. In Music as in Poetry, the heterogeneity of a work will be in great measure conditioned by its extent and scale; only, as no composition is large enough to justify incoherence, so none is small enough to dispense with diversity altogether. Look at Heine's Du bist wie eine Blume simply as a matter of phrase and versification. The unity of the lyric is beyond all question, but we may note how the extra syllables come pressing into the more impassioned stanza, and how the style of the whole is perfected by the exquisite inversion in the last line.