Modern Musical Drift

by W. J. Henderson

Weber failed to become a writer of speculative music for the same reason. He utilized the Volkslied form in his operas, and thus kept music in her throne of rule over text. Yet the effort of these two men toward an intelligible expression of feeling in music was bound to affect the composers of purely instrumental works.

There is no question in any mind that music can express feeling, or, at any rate, arouse it. From the earliest time there has been music for the feast and music for the funeral. Joy and sorrow have spoken their hearts in the accents of song. Practice in the employment of the elements of musical expression was bound to make the utterance clearer, and when the rule of the ecclesiastic scales had been broken and the modern major and minor modes had come into their own, it was but another step to the complete inheritance of the chromatic world which Cyprian di Rore strove to open up as far back as 1544.

It was when Wagner threw over the entire apparatus of the cyclic form and the lied and utilized to the utmost the resources of chromatic modulation, that music in the drama entered completely into the office of emotional expression. A new form was developed: that in which a set of melodic fragments, each with a definite significance, was woven into an instrumental ocean upon which the voice-parts floated like enchanted shallops. Wagner fairly fulfilled the Pater conception of the truly speculative artist, one "by whom no touch of the world of form, color, and passion was disregarded." Gluck treated poetry as a jewel, for which he as an artist was to provide the most chaste, beautiful, and appropriate setting. Wagner viewed poetry and music as two precious metals which he was to melt in the crucible of his genius into a new and more glorious product.

We stand to-day, in so far as opera is concerned, upon the ground cleared for us by Wagner. The Italians are striving to follow his lead, though they are instinctively and almost ineffectively endeavoring to preserve in their works that outward shape of vocal melody which is a clearly drawn national characteristic. Since Verdi's "Falstaff" nothing has been written which is of high import, for the calm contemplation of criticism cannot be deceived by the superficial cleverness of "Tosca," "La Bohème," and "Pagliacci," or the Mascagni turgidities. These works sparkle with the jewels of talent, but they never glow with the sunlight of genius. One act of Verdi's "Otello" or Boito's "Mefistofele" pales their reflected fires to the sickly yellow of a farthing rushlight.

But these writers are striving to advance beyond Wagner in the subtlety of the inner processes which they put into music. In all the Wagnerian drama there is no such purely modern product as the Scarpia of Puccini or the Osaka of Mascagni. Loge is elemental. He is a superhuman poetic creation, as well suited to the investiture of music as Milton's Lucifer. But setting Scarpia and Osaka to music is much like composing Joseph Chamberlain or Thomas Collier Platt.

The reaction of all this refinement of the means of expression in the musical drama upon instrumental music has led the song without words into a new country. The primitive descriptions of Kuhnau and Bach now make us smile. We have hunted the central secret to its lair. We have asked music to sing not only those broad moods of joy and sadness, peace and rage, which the imitation of the inflections of the voice in speech made possible for her in the very infancy of inarticulate song, but we have demanded that she chase the intellectual concept to its source and embody reasonings and conclusions as if she were the handmaid of the inductive method.

So far have we gone that we can no longer blame those primitive thinkers who seek to fasten a story upon every composition. We find even so calm a commentator as Sir George Grove regretting that Beethoven did not prefix a descriptive title to the fifth symphony in order that we might discover his expressional purpose.

We have reached a situation which reduces music to a secondary position. She is no longer a proud and independent art, in which, as Mr. Pater notes, the substance and the form are one. The classic forms in which purely musical beauty was contained, in which the attempts at expression were confined to broad mood painting and the methods were always those of thematic development, are used by comparatively few composers. The title "symphony" is placed upon works which have few of the characteristics of the Beethoven model.

True, these works do not, because they cannot, abandon the fundamental principles of musical form. Even the tone poems of Richard Strauss are built in accordance with these inexorable laws. Architecture cannot do away with walls and roofs and floors, nor the consideration of weight-sustaining power. But its outward presentations may and do travel far away from the manner of the Greeks.

Music no longer exists for herself. She seeks material always from without. Who writes now an "overture, scherzo, and finale"? Even Schumann, one of the pioneers of the modern romantic movement, did that; but our overfed imaginations require stimulation in the shape of titles. It must be an overture to an East Indian poem, which none of us ever read, or a symphonic fantasia on a Buddhistic doctrine, or a theme and variations setting forth the thoughts and actions of an allegorical character who was in himself a satire upon a generalization. In order that we may know what the composer is trying to tell us in the inarticulate language of the song without words, we must have a long and perplexing explanation by a learned pundit who constructs programme notes with the aid of a public library and a few Delphic hints from the composer himself. Then we must sit in the concert room gravely contemplating these notes while the orchestra is playing the music, and seriously endeavoring to delude ourselves into the belief that we can perform two mental processes at once,—namely, reading and grasping the fulness of the programme explanation at the same time that we listen to and analyze the composition.