Orpheus; or, The music of the future

by W. J. Turner

I do not lament this change as a disaster. I merely wish to point out the difference and to show why the music of to-day must differ from the music of yesterday. Those who believe that music is a purely abstract art (mere negation this, which I have abundantly shown to be empty of reality) will be shocked at the dependence of music upon man’s life; but the great composers themselves knew better:

“The error in the art-genre of opera consists in the fact that a Means of Expression (Music) has been made the object, while the Object of Expression (the Drama) has been made a means.”

Those words of Wagner’s show clearly that to Wagner, as Mr. Newman aptly puts it:

“To invent a theme for its own abstract sake, to pare and shape it till it was ‘workable’ and then to weave it along with others of the same kind into a pattern of which the main lines were predetermined for him by tradition—this was something he could not imagine himself doing, and that he scoffed at when he found the Conservatoire musicians engaged in.... Wagner always protested against the current fashion of performing Beethoven’s symphonies as if they were nothing more than agreeable or exciting musical patterns.”

My preceding chapters will have made it quite clear why Wagner’s instinct was right, although his mode of expression is so inexact as to be often confusing and misleading.[7] What Wagner means is that intellectual forms or death-shapes are given no significance by being manipulated, dove-tailed, and re-arranged by the intelligence working from rules and examples. It is “life” that gives significance, a spiritual urge into creation, and where this is absent there is no artistic creation. We may perceive by his use of the word “drama” that Wagner’s conception of “life” was a limited one; but he could only express the life that was in him and his soundness lay in his recognizing this. But we shall not make the mistake of inventing an artificial and unilluminating distinction between Wagner as a dramatic or programmatic composer and, for example, Mozart or Bach as absolute composers. The difference between all these composers (including Beethoven) lies mainly in inner feeling, in spiritual life, in the individual psyche—not in their musical faculty as composers. It was natural to each one of them that his vital activity should run into the form of sound-patterns. It is this idiosyncrasy which has made them all musicians and not poets, sculptors, or painters. But this peculiarity is only a physiological bias for—to quote Mr. Newman again, since he is a musician and what he says will be more appropriate here than the words of a poet or sculptor, besides being admirably clear—

“It is only the most superficial of psychologists and æstheticians who can regard any human faculty as wholly cut off from the rest. Our perceptions of sight, of taste, of touch, of hearing are inextricably interblended as is shown by our constantly expressing one set of sensations in terms of another, as when we speak of the colour of music, the height or depth or thickness or clarity or muddiness of musical tone. In every poet there is something of the painter and the musician; in every musician something of the poet and the painter; in every painter something of the musician and the poet. The character of the man’s work will depend upon the strength or weakness of the tinge that is given to his own special art by the relative strength or weakness of the infusion of one or more of the other arts.”

Thus we can explain the sensuous individuality of an artist as being a result of the special and peculiar bias and intermixture of his senses. But this is only a part of his character or personality, and it is my argument that it is the minor (though essential and indispensable) and not the major or most important part. For besides this physical individuality he has a spiritual individuality. The former is the instrument, the latter is the “life,” and, in the case of music, the physical expression, the communication, the tangible (eye and ear are “touch” at a distance) death-shape is the musical creation or form—a Bach fugue, a Beethoven symphony, a Mozart or Wagner opera, a Schubert song.

The importance of Beethoven—which Wagner was the first to understand—lay in that stupendous stream of “life” within him which burst through all the old academic forms, as the sap bursts through a tree into colour and blossom, and strewed the history of music with those gigantic skeletons of spiritual life which we know as his works. But we have yet to discover the meaning of these compositions. Their full meaning can only be felt, it cannot be re-stated—except when his works are adequately performed; but they have a characteristic to which I shall try to give a verbal construction because I think it immensely important. It is not a quality for which there exists a word, or a phrase, or even a poem; but it is a particular kind of desire. “Like as a hart desireth the water-brooks so thirsteth my soul after the living God,” that—were it not for its association with the desires of Baptists, Methodists, Wesleyans, Anglicans, Catholics, Mohammedans, Buddhists, Christian Scientists, Mormons, and all those bodies of people known to-day as “religious”—would perhaps be suggestive. At any rate it would serve to distinguish the quality of this desire or passion from the passion which created Tristan und Isolde. And, magnificent and beautiful as that was, its magnificence compared with the magnificence of Beethoven’s passion is as the magnificence of a coloured duck to a black swan. The simile is a totally unworthy one, for we have nothing to which we can compare Beethoven. We can easily find similes for Wagner, but Beethoven is a rara avis.

It is natural to the young to be idealists, an old idealist is generally either a rogue or a fool—unless he happens to be a Beethoven. The young find something stirring in their hearts when listening to Beethoven which they never find when listening to Bach, Mozart or Wagner, great as these composers are. Beethoven awakes a feeling so romantic, so idealistic, of so fine and exquisite a bloom that it is guarded by everyone who experiences it as a precious secret. What Beethoven imagined inevitably lures men away from the sensuous delights of Debussy and Strauss, from the fatiguing excitements of Stravinsky and Jazz, from the gaieties of Verdi and Rossini, from the sentimental nostalgia of Brahms, from the solid satisfaction of Bach, from the sensitive melancholy of Mozart and from the lesser loves of Wagner; but why it does so we cannot tell.

“Had I been willing,” said Beethoven to Schindler in 1823, in the course of a conversation about the Countess Giulietta Guicciardi, “to surrender thus my vital power and my life what would have been left of the best and noblest in me?” What a different ring this plain statement has beside the rhetorical pæans to renunciation on the lips of Wagner, who was satisfied to accept what would never have satisfied Beethoven.