Chapter VII: THE SYMPHONY (continued)

I. THE UNITY OF THE SYMPHONY

For the ordinary listener to a symphony the one great difficulty lies in “making sense” out of it as a whole. He enjoys certain themes and is, perhaps, able to follow their devious wanderings, but he retains no comprehensive impression of the symphony as a complete thing, and he may even never conceive it as anything more than a series of interesting or uninteresting passages of music. Now, it is obvious that an art of pure sound, if it is to have any significance at all, must have complete coherence _within itself_, and that the longer the sounds go on the more necessary does this coherence become. This is, of course, the problem of all music. Even opera must have a certain musical coherence, for it cannot depend entirely on being held together by the text and action; even the song must make musical sense in addition to what sense (by chance) there is in the words. Give what glowing, what romantic, even what definite title you will to a piece of programme music,--call it “The Hebrides,” or “Death and Transfiguration,” or descend to such a title as “A Simple Confession,”--you must still give your music coherence in itself. As a matter of fact, the titles of pieces of programme music do not lessen the composer’s responsibilities in the least, and there is no fine piece of such music in existence that does not obey the general laws of form as applied to music. The title is, after all, merely a suggestion, an indication, an atmosphere. Schumann’s “The Happy Farmer” is merely jolly; it is not even bucolic, and you hunt for the farmer in vain; “Träumerei” is made rhythmically vague in order to create the illusion of reverie, but has, nevertheless, complete musical coherence; “Tod und Verklärung” of Strauss contains no evidence of sacrificing its form to its so-called “subject,” and the Wagnerian _leit-motif_ is suggestive and not didactic.

The development of form in the symphony is too large a subject to be covered here, but there are certain fundamental aspects of it upon which I may dwell with safety, since they obey laws which apply everywhere. To make clear what I mean let me say that an art whose fundamental quality is movement must have for its problem the disposition within a certain length of time of a certain group of themes or melodies. The distinction between this art and that of painting is that in music the question is “When?” in painting “Where?” In this sense literature is nearer music than is painting, and I shall shortly point out some analogies between literary and musical forms. I stated in the first chapter the fundamental synthetic principle of music, which is that no one series of sounds formed into a melody can long survive the substitution of other series, unless there be given some restatement, or, at least, some reminder of the first. There is no musical form that does not pay tribute directly or indirectly to this principle. And this, much modified by the medium of language, applies also to literature. Most novels contain near the end a “looking backward over traveled roads”; a too great digression from any thesis requires a certain restatement of it. The first appearance of Sandra Belloni is heralded by her singing in the wood near the Poles’ country house. The epilogue to “Vittoria” closes with the scene in the cathedral: “Carlo Merthyr Ammiani, standing between Merthyr and her, with old blind Agostino’s hands upon his head. And then once more, and but for once, her voice was heard in Milan.” The unessential characters and motives of Sandra Belloni disappear in “Vittoria”--Mrs. Chump, an unsuccessful essay in Dickens, finds a deserved oblivion; so do the “Nice Feelings” and the “Fine Shades”; but the presence of Merthyr in the cathedral is as necessary to that situation as is the absence of Wilfred. “War and Peace” would be an inchoate mass of persons, scenes, and events, were it not for certain retrospects here and there which hold the whole mass together. “The Idiot” is a striking illustration, for the early part of Mishkin’s career only appears in the sixth chapter, as if to tide over more successfully the vastness of the scheme; and the final chapter brings back most vividly the experiences of his boyhood. The sonnet is the most concise example of this process, and I do not need to dwell on the precision with which it illustrates it.

One great difference exists, however, between music and literature, and that is in the number of its subjects or characters. “War and Peace,” to take an extreme example, contains scores of characters, while a whole symphony would usually contain not more than twelve or fourteen themes. The prime reason for this is that themes have no established law of association, and so do not represent something else with which we are already familiar as do names of persons in books. We remember the names of such characters as Joseph Andrews or Tom Jones, or even Dr. Portsoaken, for, although they lived a long time ago, we have enough word association to contain their names and we can understand them and can follow the devious courses of their adventures and the philosophy of life they represent. (The absence of this association makes it difficult for us to remember the characters in Russian novels.) When we hear a musical theme, however, we have to remember it as such.

I have frequently stated the somewhat obvious fact that music obeys general æsthetic laws, and the foregoing is intended to show how these laws are modified by the peculiar properties of sound. A symphony in this sense, then, is a coherent arrangement of themes. This brings me to the important question of the detachment or the unification of the several movements of a symphony. Is a symphony one thing or four? Should we listen to it as a unit, or as separate contrasting pieces strung together for convenience? The conventional answer to these questions--the answer given by the textbooks--is that a few symphonies transfer themes from one movement to another, but that, speaking generally, a symphony is a collection of four separate pieces contrasted in speed and in sentiment, etc. Now I wish to combat this theory as vigorously as possible, and I should like to rely solely on general æsthetic laws, and say that no great work of art could, by any possibility, be based on such a heterogeneous plan as that. Or I might base my opinion on psychology and say that, since there are four different movements, different in general and in particular characteristics,--one containing themes which evolve as they proceed, producing the effect of struggle toward a goal, another suited to states of sentiment, another for concise and vivid action, and so forth,--and since the mind of a great man is a microcosm of the world and contains everything, it follows, as a matter of course, that he tries to fuse his symphony into one by filling its several parts with the various elements of himself, a process that has been going on ever since there has been any music at all. The composer is not four men, nor is his mind separated into compartments. One symphony will differ from another because it will represent a different stage in his development, but any one symphony--unless arbitrarily disjointed--will express the various phases of its composer’s nature at the time, and will have a corresponding internal organism. This is sufficient evidence of the soundness of this view in the great symphonies themselves. I cannot specify at length here, but any reader having access to Mozart’s, Beethoven’s, and Brahms’s symphonies or that of César Franck may investigate for himself. Let me merely point out a few instances which I choose from celebrated and familiar symphonies. In the last movement of the C major of Mozart (commonly called the “Jupiter”) there is a rapid figure in the basses at measures nine and ten which is derived from the beginning of the first movement. The theme of the last movement is drawn from--is another version of--the passage in measures three and four of the first movement. In Beethoven’s “Eroica” the first theme of the last movement is drawn directly from the first theme of the first movement. The theme of the C major section of the “Marche Funèbre” is the theme of the first section in apotheosis, and each owes a debt to the first theme of the first movement. Illustrations of this principle could be multiplied almost indefinitely, and it is not too much to say that there is in all great music this inward coherence. In other words, form in music is not merely a sort of framework, or, if you please, a law or precedent, but the expression of an inward force.

Themes having no organic relation are, of course, introduced in symphonic movements for the play of action against each other which results from their antagonism. The novel depends largely on the same element. If it were not for Blifil there could hardly have been a Tom Jones. Sandra Belloni must have Mr. Pericles as a foil to that finer character of hers which rises above the prima donna, and she needs Wilfred and Merthyr in order to achieve Carlo. In short, the symphonic movement is not unlike the novel which is based on the juxtaposition of contrasted or antagonistic characters or elements, the struggle between the two, and, finally, their reconciliation; and sufficient analogy could be drawn between this and life itself to illustrate the principle as a cardinal one. But I believe the symphony to be still in flux. I see no reason why it should not continue to develop from within and finally to achieve an even greater inward coherence than that already attained. This will almost certainly not be brought about by an extension of its outward form or by an enlargement of its resources--as is the case with many modern symphonies.[12] In brief, the composer is an artist like any other; he is dealing with human emotions and aspirations as other artists are; he is subject to the same laws; he, too, draws a true picture of human life in true perspective, with all the adjustments of scene, of persons, of motives, carefully worked out--even though he deals only with sound. It is almost incredible that any one should suppose otherwise; the real difficulty is in getting the ordinary person to suppose anything! So I say that the symphony is a mirror of life, and that all the great symphonies taken together are like a book of life in which everything is faithfully set forth in due proportion and balance.

I have said that the symphony contains everything and that it has room for disorder. This is its ultimate purpose. The secret of its power lies in this. Life itself is an inexplicable thing. The great symphony compresses it into an hour of perfection in which all of its elements are explicable. Here that dream of man which he calls by such names as “heaven” or “happiness,” and which he has always sought in vain, becomes not only a reality, but the only reality possible for him. For nothing would be more terrible than endless happiness or a located heaven.

II. STAGES OF ITS DEVELOPMENT

The history of the symphony is the history of all art. It moves in cycles; it marks a parabola. It began as a naïve expression of feeling; it learned little by little how to master its own working material, and as it mastered that, it became more and more conscious in its efforts; as soon as new instruments for producing it were perfected, it immediately expanded its style to correspond to the new possibilities; as its technique permitted, it continually sought to grasp more and more of the elements of human life and human aspiration and to express them. In Haydn we see it as naïve, folk-like, tuneful music, not highly imaginative, smacking of the soil--like Burns, but without his deep human feeling. In Mozart it reaches a stage of classic perfection which may be compared to Raphael’s paintings. Hardly a touch of the picturesque, the romantic, or the realistic mars its serene beauty; it smiles on all alike; it is not for you or for me,--as Schumann is,--but for every one. And being purely objective it belongs to no time and lasts forever. And how delightful are Mozart’s digressions. He is like Fielding, who, when he wants to philosophize about his story, proceeds to write a whole chapter during which the action awaits the philosopher’s pleasure. Later writers never drop the argument for a moment; if there is a lull in the action it is somehow kept in complete relation to the subject-matter. Mozart often enlivens you with a story by-the-way, but he always manages to preserve the continuity of his material. The difference between his method and that of Brahms, for example, is like that between Fielding’s philosophic interlude chapters in “Tom Jones” and Meredith’s “Our Philosopher,” who, looking down from an impersonal height upon the characters in the story, interjects his Olympian comment.

A new and terrific force entered music through Beethoven, new to music, old as the human race--namely, the spirit of revolt. The world is always the same. In its fundamentals, human life, within our historical retrospect, remains what it was. An art takes what it can master--and no more. Music was ready; the world was in a turmoil at just that moment, and the result was what we call “Beethoven.” Mozart was his dawn, Schumann and the other Romanticists his mysterious and beautiful twilight. He himself represents at once the spirit of revolution, that inevitable curiosity which such a period always excites, and that speculative philosophy which tries to piece the meaning of new things. The world was full of flame; battle thundered only a few miles from Vienna; the spirit of equality and fraternity was hovering in the air. Beethoven’s piercing vision compassed all this. He sounded the triumph of the soul of man--as in the great theme at the close of the Ninth Symphony; he took the simplest of common tunes and made it glorious--as at the end of the “Waldstein” Sonata; his imagination ranged at will over men struggling in death-grapple, over the gods looking down sardonically on the spectacle. He was the great protagonist of democracy, but he was also a great constructive mind. He never destroyed anything in music for which he did not have a better substitute, and there is hardly a note in his mature compositions that is not fixed in nature.

This great force having spent itself, the art turns away and starts in another direction--as it must. The lyric symphony of Schubert appears. His was the most perfect song that ever asked for expression by the orchestra. With small intellectual power, with but scanty education of any sort, Schubert, by the very depth of his instinct, creates such pure beauty as to make intellectualism seem almost pedantic. He strings together melody after melody in “profuse, unmeditated art.” He was a pendant to Beethoven, and often enough in listening to Schubert’s music we catch the echo of his great contemporary. Then comes the so-called “Romantic School” of Schumann with its tender, personal qualities, its glamour, its roseate hues. Like all other romantic utterance it had a certain strangeness, a certain detachment from reality, and a certain waywardness which give it a bitter-sweet flavor of its own. Like all other romantic utterance, too, it was impatient and refused to wait the too-slow turning of the clock’s hands; it is the music of youth and of hope. Its effect on the development of the symphony was slight. It was ill at ease in the large spaces of symphonic form, for its hues were too changing, its moods too shifting, to answer the needs of the symphony. No really great symphonic composer appears between Schubert and Brahms, but during that period the rich idiom of the Romantic School had become assimilated as a part of the language of music.

Brahms using something of this romantic idiom, but having a broad feeling for construction, and firmly grounded on that one stable element of style, counterpoint, produced four symphonies worthy to stand alongside the best. They are restrained in style, for Brahms has something of that impersonality which is needed in music as much as in other forms of art (and one may say, in passing, that the greatest of all composers, Bach, is the most impersonal). The flexibility of the language of music increased rapidly during the nineteenth century aided by Wagner and the Romanticists, and in Brahms the symphony becomes less didactic and more introspective. I may, perhaps, make the comparison between music like his and that later stage of the English novel wherein the author desires the action to appear solely as the result of the psychology of the characters, and wherein, also, words are made to answer new demands and serve new purposes. Brahms could not have said what he did say had he been limited to the style of Mozart; nor could Meredith had he been limited to the style of Thackeray. Brahms’s symphonies, in consequence of the complicated nature of his style, are not easily apprehended by the casual listener. Let a confirmed lover of Longfellow, or even of Tennyson, take up for the first time “Love in the Valley” and he will have the same experience. Every word will convey its usual meaning to him, but the exquisite beauty of the poem will elude him. He will go back to “My Lost Youth,” or to “Blow, Bugles, Blow,” for healing from his bruises. Any one of my readers who has access to Brahms’s First Symphony should examine the passage which begins twenty measures before the _poco sostenuto_ near the end of the first movement if he wished to understand something of Brahms’s powers of re-creating his material. Here is a melody of great beauty which is derived from the opening phrase of the symphony, and which has a bass derived from the first theme of the first movement. As it originally appeared it was full of stress as though yearning for an impossible fulfillment. Here its destiny is at last attained, and the law of its being fulfilled. Music progresses from one point of time to another.

Contemporaneous with Brahms stands Tschaikovsky to reveal how varied are the sources of musical expression. No two great men could be farther apart than these--one an eclectic, calm, thoughtful, and impersonal, restraining his utterances in order to understate and be believed; the other pouring out the very last bitter drop of his unhappiness and dissatisfaction entirely unmindful of a world that distrusts overstatement and has only a limited capacity for reaction from a colossal passion. Of Tschaikovsky’s sincerity there is no doubt whatever. He so believed; life was to him what we hear it to be in his symphonies. But life is not like that. If it were we should all have been destroyed long since by our own uncontrollable inner fires. So, aside from any technical considerations,--and he contributed nothing of importance to the development of the symphony,--Tschaikovsky represents a phase of life rather than life itself. Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony adds a new and interesting element to symphonic evolution. Dvořák was like Haydn and Burns, a son of the people, and the themes he employs in this symphony are essentially folk-melodies. But where Haydn merely tells his simple story with complete unconsciousness of its possible connection with life in general, Dvořák sees all his themes in their deeper significance. The “New World” Symphony is a saga retold.

A new phase in the development of the symphony appears in César Franck, whose musical lineage reaches back over the whole range of symphonic development and beyond. His spirit is mediæval. In his one symphony rhythm plays a lesser part, and one feels the music to be quite withdrawn from the vivid movement of life, and to live in a realm of its own. Franck was one of those rare spirits who remain untainted by the world. His symphony is a spiritual adventure; other symphonies are full of the actions and reactions of the real world in which their composers lived. This action and reaction always depends for its expression in music on the play and inter-play of rhythmic figures. Franck’s symphony broods over the world of the spirit; his least successful themes are those based on action.

III. CHAMBER MUSIC AS AN INTRODUCTION TO SYMPHONIES

My object in writing all this about the form and substance of the symphony, and in drawing comparisons between it and the novel or poetry, has not been to lead my readers to understand music through the other arts, for _by themselves_ such comparisons are of small value. I have dwelt on these common characteristics of the arts because they exist, because they illuminate each other, and at the same time because they are too little considered. The only way to understand music is to practice it, or, failing that, to hear it under such conditions as will permit a certain opportunity for reflection. We are incapable of understanding symphonic music chiefly because we have so little practice in doing so. An occasional symphony concert is not enough. How shall this difficulty be overcome? There is a natural way out, and it consists in what is called “chamber music.” A piece of chamber music is a sort of domestic symphony. A string quartette, a pianoforte or violin sonata, a trio, quartette, quintette, etc.,--these are all little symphonies; the form is almost identical, the same devices of rhythm, melody, harmony, counterpoint, and so forth, are employed. In chamber music paucity of idea cannot be covered up by luxury of tone color; everything is exposed; so that only the greatest composers have written fine music in this form. Now, if in every community there were groups of people who played chamber music together, and if these would permit their friends to attend when they practice, the symphony would soon find plenty of listeners. Such rehearsals would give an opportunity to hear difficult passages played over and over again; there would be time for discussion, and, above all, for reflection. Every town and village should have a local chamber-music organization giving occasional informal concerts. Under these circumstances a sympathetic intimacy would soon be established between the performers and listeners and the music itself. The inevitable and indiscriminate pianoforte lesson is an obstacle to this much desired arrangement. Some of our children should be taught the violin or the violoncello in preference to the pianoforte. Then the family circle could hear sonatas for violin and pianoforte by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, or Brahms, and would accomplish what years of attendance at symphony concerts could not bring about. Chamber music has the great advantage of being simple in detail; one can easily follow the four strands of melody in a string quartette, whereas the orchestra leaves one breathless and confused. The practice of chamber music by amateurs would be one of the very best means of building up true musical taste. I cannot dwell too insistently on the fact that the majority of those people who do not care for such music would soon learn to care for it if they had opportunities to listen to it under such conditions as I have described. The argument proves itself, without the evidence--plentiful enough--of individuals who have gone through the experience. Furthermore, by cultivating music in this way, we should gradually break down some of the social conditions which now operate against the art. If we all knew more about it and loved it for itself, we should give over our present adulation of technique. We should put the performer where he belongs as an interpreter of a greater man’s ideas. By our uncritical adulations we place him on far too high a pedestal.

IV. THE PERFORMER AND THE PUBLIC

I have spoken of certain social conditions which affect music unfavorably. There has been always a certain outcry against music because of its supposed emotionalism. The eye of cold intelligence, seeing the music-lover enthralled by a symphony, raises its lid in icy contempt for such a creature of feeling. The sociologist, observing musical performers, wonders why music seems to affect the appearance and the conduct of some of them so unfavorably. The pedagogue, who has his correct educational formula which operates like an adding-machine, and automatically turns out a certain number of mechanically educated children, each with a diploma clutched in a nervous hand--he tolerates music because it makes a pleasant break in diploma-giving at graduation time, and because it pleases the parents. The business man leaves music to his wife and daughters and is willing to subscribe to a symphony orchestra provided he does not have to go to hear it play. Now, if the sociologist would put himself in the place of the singer, who, endowed by nature with a fine voice, is able, on account of a public indifferently educated in music, to gain applause and an undue source of money, even though he has never achieved education of any sort whatever--if the sociologist would but think a little _about sociology_, he would perhaps finally understand that he himself is very likely at fault. For it is very likely that he knows almost nothing of this art which is one of the greatest forces at his disposal. He is, perhaps, one of the large number of persons who make musical conditions what they are. Public performers are the victims, not the criminals. We must remember of old how disastrous has been the isolation of any class of workers from their fellows.

I have referred in this and in the preceding chapters to certain unities in symphonic music--in its several elements of rhythm, melody, and harmony, and in the whole. I have said that every object is unified in itself, and that it is a part of a greater whole. In this sense a symphony is a living thing; every member of it has its own function, and contributes a necessary part to the whole. But is not this equally true if we carry the argument into life itself and say: Here is a thing of beauty created by man; it is a part of him--one of his star-gleams; can he be complete if he loses it altogether? Can his spirit hope for freedom if he depends on his mind alone? Is the satisfaction of intellectual or material achievement enough? Would he not find in music a realm where he would breathe a purer air and be happier because he would leave behind him all those unanswerable questions which forever cry a halt to his intelligence? Moral idealism is not enough for the spirit of men and women, for, humanity being what it is, morality is bound to crystallize into dogma. The Puritans were moral in their own fashion, but they were as far away from what man’s life ought to be--under the stars, and with the flowers blooming at his feet--as were the gay courtiers whom they despised. Intellectual idealism is not enough, because it lacks sympathy. We all need something that shall be entirely detached from life and, at the same time, be wholly true to it. Our spirit needs some joyousness which objects, ideas, or possessions cannot give it. We must have a world beyond the one we know--a world not of jasper and diamonds, but of dreams and visions. It must be an illusion to our senses, a reality to our spirit. It must tell the truth in terms we cannot understand, for it is not given to us to know in any other way.

FOOTNOTE:

[12] The reason for this is one to which I referred in the chapter on “The Opera”--namely, that a work of art must not overstrain the capacities of those human beings for whom it was intended.