Thirdly, he has gone over, horse, foot, and baggage, to the Wagnerian camp and armed himself from head to foot with leading motives. In "The Apostles" there are ninety-two of them—just two more than Hans von Wolzogen found in the whole of "Der Ring des Nibelungen." The result is that there is almost no free composition in the score; it is all woven out of the motives. The web thus woven is sometimes thick, sometimes thin. Motives steal upon us singly or crowd before us four at a time, writhing in a counterpoint, sometimes forming most beautiful orchestral cloud shapes and again smearing garish shades and monstrous outlines across the musical firmament. Elgar never shrinks from outlandish combinations. He is as daring as Strauss. He makes fearful ugliness when he wishes to do so. But he does everything with a delineative purpose. He is the Wagnerite of oratorio.
To Wagner's ingenious scheme of interweaving and developing leading motives Elgar has joined the ground plan of polyphonic choral writing which was the secret of the influence of Bach and Handel, but Elgar has a palette with a thousand tone tints which they never knew. He has all the delicate inner tracery of modern harmonization to throw additional lights and shades upon his colors.
In a word, Elgar has brought together in his oratorios all the expressional power of modern musical romanticism, whether found in the descriptive tone pictures of the instrumentalists, the declamation of the dramatists, or the orchestration of the contemporaneous opera. What is the result? We have now oratorio quite as dramatic as Tinel's, but saved from mere theatricalism by the artistic discretion of the composer.
But the thing itself is anomalous. As we have noted, the narrator becomes an imperative necessity, because oratorio now demands scenic representation, and that is forbidden. How much more imposing would "The Apostles" be if we would frankly go back to the way of Cavaliere and put it on the stage! Why enact "Parsifal" and not this? Which is the truer tale, the more convincing art? This "Apostles" reads like that question-begging version of "Parsifal" as a narrative poem in which all the stage directions are turned into descriptive verse. Set those descriptions to music and have them recited by singers in evening dress and you have your "Parsifal" in correct oratorio form.
Are we afraid of it? Or is it simply that certain good people to whom the theatre is a place accursed must have their dramatic excitements in some other form? Let us, if you will, go to a dimly lighted concert hall and sit with our heads bent over our scores while ladies and gentlemen, gloved and in evening dress, narrate and chant to us a tremendous drama, helped out by all the resources of modern delineative music, and we try to see the action with our mind's eye. Thus shall we salve our consciences and perform the tragedy of the Passion within the four walls of our skulls. This may perchance insure to us that salvation which might be endangered were we fearlessly to countenance an actual presentation of the drama on the stage.
The oratorio of to-day tends steadily toward the completion of a cycle. It started from the primitive religious play of Cavaliere, and through the development of the method of choral composition reached a point at which all conception of action disappeared. From that point it has been slowly and surely moving around to the restoration of the dramatic element, till now it stands once more at the very threshold of the theatre. In its present form it is an absurdity. Even the singers find it almost impossible to sing the oratorios of the new sort without putting at least facial expression into their work, and every one of them looks solemnly conscious of the foolishness of evening dress. Mr. Elgar's interpretation makes Judas Iscariot altogether too realistic for a white waistcoat, and his Mary Magdalen in a Princess gown with kid-gloved arms is a portrait which would make Henner gasp and Ruskin stare.
NOTE
The chapters of this volume, except three, appeared originally as articles in the New York Sun in the course of the two years during which I have had the honor to serve that paper. The first half of the chapter on "Strauss and the Song Writers" and the chapter entitled "The Classic of the Unprogressive" were first printed in the New York Times, of which it was my privilege to be musical editor for some years. The first of the four articles on Richard Strauss was previously published in the Atlantic Monthly. My thanks are due to the proprietors and editors of the journals named for permission to incorporate the essays in this book.