Modern Musical Drift

by W. J. Henderson

It seems about time for us to return to our Ambros and study his admirable book on the "Boundaries of Music and Poetry." Here is his just and convincing conclusion: "But in its ideal feature, music keeps within its natural boundaries so long as it does not undertake to go beyond its expressional capacity,—that is, so long as the poetical thought of the composer becomes intelligible from the moods called forth by his work and the train of ideas stimulated thereby, that is, from the composition itself; and so long as nothing foreign, not organically connected with the music itself, must be dragged in in order to assist comprehension."

How many of our ultra-refined orchestral studies in logic will stand examination in the searching light of that proclamation? Yet Ambros comes to that conclusion at the end of a volume written in answer to Hanslick's "The Beautiful in Music," of which the fundamental doctrine is that music has not expressional power at all. Ambros set out to show that it had, but that there was a point beyond which it could not go.

That point he found set clearly in view in the symphonic works of Berlioz. He recounts the process of development of that master's "Romeo et Juliette" symphony. He compares it with Mendelssohn's "Meerestille und Glückliche Fahrt" overture, and notes that the title of the latter is an exact reproduction of Goethe's language. But "there is in the matter the great difference that this tonal work, even utterly apart from Goethe's poem, is in and through itself explicable and intelligible, and bears in itself its æsthetic centre of gravity and the conditions of its existence, whereas in the case of 'Romeo and Juliet' the centre of gravity lies outside, the music,—that is to say, in the Shakespearian drama."

Mendelssohn, when he conceived his "Fingal's Cave" overture, embodied in a sentence the impeccable theory of correctly conceived programme music. He wrote to his sister that he could not describe such a thing, but he could play it. Having absorbed the mood of that landscape, he, being a musician, could reproduce it only in tones. Berlioz, on the other hand, sought not only to picture in his music the personalities and passions of the lovers, but he sought to reproduce in the form of a scherzo the poetic description of an imaginary conception, Queen Mab, put into the mouth of a character created by Shakespeare! It was a long way round, was it not?

How great a difference is there between that process and Mr. Strauss's attempt to convey to us in music the conversation of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza or the anger of the knight at seeing the false Dulcinea? The centre of gravity is outside the music. So it is in "Ein Heldenleben," Strauss's strongest composition, and in his other tone poems. Tschaïkowsky, on the other hand, was content to write "Pathetique"—even more than was needed—over his sixth symphony, and let it stand with that. His "Romeo and Juliet" overture fantasia is dependent upon itself alone for its artistic justification. The centre of æsthetic gravity is in the work.

Let us, however, give Mr. Strauss the benefit of his own utterances. In 1897, in speaking of "Also sprach Zarathustra" he said: "I did not intend to write philosophical music, nor to portray Nietzsche's great work musically. I meant to convey musically an idea of the development of the human race from its origin through the various phases of development (religious as well as scientific) up to Nietzsche's idea of the Uebermensch, the Beyond-Man of Goethe."

As a London critic remarked at the time, "even this is a tall order." Of course Mr. Strauss's word must be accepted. But before the present writer lies an elaborate pamphlet of some forty pages by Frederick Roesch and Eberhard Koenig, entitled "Ein Heldenleben, Tondichtung für Grosses Orchester, von Richard Strauss." It reproduces sixty-eight themes from the tone poem and has a long and laborious explanation of the composer's purpose and meaning. There are similar programme notes for other works by this composer. Persons who admit the iniquity of such explanations stoutly maintain that Mr. Strauss does not approve of them. The one before us was published by F. E. C. Leuckart, of Leipsic. On the last page are advertised several compositions by Strauss published by the same person.

Furthermore, previous to the production of the "Symphonia Domestica" in New York last March, Mr. Strauss had steadfastly denied that there was any programme for the work. "It represents simply a day in my family life," he said. These statements were repeated in the official programme note of the concert, written by my colleague, H. E. Krehbiel, of the New York Tribune. The day after the concert the New York Times published a detailed programme of the symphony, furnished to the writer, Richard Aldrich, by Dr. Strauss, and that programme was more elaborate and materialistic than any imagined by uninformed gropers after the composer's meaning.

Howsoever these things be, the ultimate question remains: Will the compositions of Mr. Strauss and his kind stand the test of Ambros? Is their æsthetic centre of gravity within themselves? That is a true test of all art works. The test of a Corot landscape is not its perfect portraiture of a place, but its complete and satisfying existence as a painting; and that, be it noted, is wholly a matter of artistic feeling in the work itself. The test of a poem is not its power to convey to the reader a mental photograph of the scene or action or thought which inspired the work, but to touch the reader's emotions, to stimulate his imagination by and through itself alone. Neither the observer of the landscape nor the reader of the poem is asked to look outside of the work itself for an explanation of its mood. The picture and the poem fully explain themselves. They lay before the mind both cause and effect.

This music cannot do. Long ago it was called the language of emotion, and the embodiment of feeling is its highest province. Even in the opera, with the assistance of text and action, music should not strive to go further than this. Its office is to voice the emotions which lie behind action and speech, to raise to the tenth power those simpler and more limited inflections and tones of the voice which are used in the spoken drama. In the great instrumental song without words it is again moods and emotions that music must proclaim. Mr. Strauss may tell us that in "Also sprach Zarathustra" he did not attempt to do the things which makers of programme explanations accused him of doing, but merely to put before us, in music, the simple process of the religious and scientific development of the human race up to the conception of the Beyond-Man.