Chapter VII: Appendix: Wagner, Berlioz, Liszt, and Mr. Ashton Ellis 305 (4)

Just as the average programmist is, on the whole, more generous in his appreciations than the average absolutist, so he has done more to clear up the darkness that envelops too much of the subject. From this side there has come some good æsthetic discussion; from the other side there has come little but dogged and tiresome repetition of old catch-words, without any serious attempt to grapple with the psychology of the question as a whole. In the latest edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music, Mr. Fuller Maitland gives us an example of this method of "killing Kruger with your mouth." "It is only natural," he says, "that programme music should for the time being be more popular with the masses than absolute music, since the majority of people like having something else to think of while they are listening to music." The last clause I take to be purely random assertion; there are millions of people--even among the masses--who prefer abstract ear-tickling that saves them the trouble of thinking of anything else while they are listening. Nay, one of the complaints of the untutored amateur against programme music is that it is so hard to follow--that he cannot sit quietly in his seat and just listen to the music as it comes, but must needs first read and pre-digest a long story out of the analytical programme. Minds of this kind--and I have met with many of them--protest simply because they _have_ to think of something else while the notes are being poured into their ears. This rather lame device is one way of disparaging programme music--the device of implying that it is most popular with the "masses," with people, that is, of limited musical culture--which is of course not true. The other way of denigrating it is the time-honoured one of an appeal to the past; it is the æsthetic equivalent of the frequent appeal to the Agnostic to remember what he "learned at his mother's knee." "In the great line of the classic composers," Mr. Maitland tells us, "programme music holds the very slightest place; an occasional _jeu d'esprit_, like Bach's _Capriccio on the Departure of a Brother_, or Haydn's 'Farewell' Symphony, may occur in their works, but we cannot imagine these men, or the others of the great line, seriously undertaking, as the business of their lives, the composition of works intended to illustrate a definite programme. Beethoven is sometimes quoted as the great introducer of illustrative music, in virtue of the Pastoral Symphony, and of a few other specimens of what, by a stretch of terms, may be called programme music. But the value he set upon it as compared with absolute music may be fairly gauged by seeing what relation his 'illustrative' works bear to the others. Of the nine symphonies, only one has anything like a programme; and the master is careful to guard against misconceptions even here, since he superscribes the whole symphony, 'More the expression of feeling than painting.' Of the pianoforte sonatas, op. 90 alone has a definite programme; and in the 'Muss es sein?' of the string quartet, op. 135, the natural inflections of the speaking voice, in question and reply, have obviously given purely musical suggestions which are carried out on purely musical lines."

To all this there are a good many objections to be raised. (1) In Bach's time programme music, as we understand it, simply could _not_ be written. There was not the modern orchestra with the modern orchestral technique; you could no more delineate _Francesca da Rimini_ with the instruments of Bach's time than you could adequately suggest a rainbow with a piece of paper and a lead pencil. Further, for the expression of a number of things that we now express in music, there were needed (_a_) the modern enlargement of the musical vocabulary, and (_b_) the "fertilisation of music by poetry," on which Wagner rightly laid such stress. But in any case Bach's neglect of programme music is no argument against the form. We might as well say that the fact that he wrote no operas is a proof of the natural and perpetual inferiority of opera. (2) Mr. Maitland passes over the fact that, imperfect as their means of utterance were, many old composers _were_ frequently obsessed by the desire to write something else than absolute music. He says nothing of the attempts of Muffat, of the composers represented in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, of Jannequin, of Buxtehude, of Frescobaldi, of Hermann, of Gombert, of Carlo Farino, of Frohberger, of Kuhnau, of Couperin, of Rameau, of Dittersdorf, and others, of some of whom I shall speak shortly.[19] There has always been a strong desire to write "illustrative" music, but for a long time it was checked by the imperfection of the media through which it had to work. (3) He ignores Haydn's excursions into "illustrative" music in the _Creation_ and the _Seasons_--the representation of chaos, of the passage from winter to spring, of the dawn, of the peasants' joyful feelings at the rich harvest, of the thick clouds at the commencement of winter; he says nothing of the "illustrative" symphonies or parts of symphonies and other works of Haydn--"the morning," "midday," "the evening," "the tempest," "the hunt," "the philosopher," "the hen," "the bear," and so on. (4) He says nothing of the manner in which the overture, both operatic and non-operatic, became more and more "illustrative" at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century; he does not refer to the works of Beethoven in which the "illustrative" function is very apparent, such as the _Battle of_ _Vittoria_, the _Leonora_ overtures, the _Egmont_, the _Coriolan_, the _Ruins of Athens_, the _King Stephen_, and so on. (5) He blindly accepts Beethoven's nonsensical remark about the Pastoral Symphony being "more the expression of feeling than painting." The imitations of the nightingale, the cuckoo, and the quail may or may not be a Beethoven joke; but if they are not specimens of "painting" in music it is difficult to say what deserves that epithet. If the peasants' merrymaking, again, the brawl, the falling of the raindrops, the rushing of the wind, the storm, the flow of the brook--if these are not "painting" but merely the "expression of feeling," well, so is the hanging of Till Eulenspiegel, the death-shudder of Don Juan, and the battle in _Ein Heldenleben_. (6) Even supposing that Beethoven's words could be taken literally, even supposing that in his music he had not given them contradiction after contradiction, still this would not settle the matter. Music did not end with Beethoven, and he might have detested "illustrative" music to his heart's content without that fact being an argument against the writing of it by other people. It is curious that the men who always tell admiringly the stories of Beethoven breaking through the fetters in which his contemporaries would have bound him, should try to use the same Beethoven as a barrier against all future innovations. _He_ was great because he refused to write in any way but his own; _we_ are to be great by submitting our convictions to those of a hundred years ago. With all respect, and without any irreverent desire to pluck the beards of our fathers, we are unable to regard the question as finally settled by what Beethoven said. He himself would surely have been the last man to play the ineffective Canute, and dictate to the art the exact spot on the beach to which its flood might rise. There is no evidence that he meant his words to be a judicial condemnation of anybody or anything; there is no evidence that he had ever given much critical thought to the question; and it is quite certain that no matter how much he had thought about it he could not have seen in it all that we, with our later experience, can see.

III

One fact alone should make opponents of programme music think seriously of their position. The most significant feature of the problem is the way in which the practical musicians have dealt with it. Whereas most of the older orchestral music of any value was absolute music, most of the later orchestral music of any value is programme music; and the momentum of the latter species seems to be increasing every year. It will not do to pooh-pooh a phenomenon of this kind, nor to seek to fasten upon it the explanation that some of the new men write music depending upon literary or pictorial subjects because they cannot write music of the other kind. This is like saying that Shakespeare pusillanimously wrote dramas because he could not write epics--which is probably a true saying, but quite irrelevant. The point is, why should Shakespeare, with a gift for good drama, force himself to write bad epics? And if a man's musical ideas spring from quite another way of apprehending life than that of the absolute musician, why should he abjure his own native form of speech in order to mouth and maul unintelligently the phrases and the forms of another musician whose mental world is wholly foreign to his? In any case, while some of the critics have been paternally warning young composers against falling into the toils of programme music, and recommending them to keep to the lines of structure as they were laid down by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, the musicians themselves have been flinging programme music right and left to the world. One has only to take up a catalogue of the Russian, French, German, Belgian, American, or even English music published during the last twenty years to see how enormously this form of art has grown, and how the really big men all display a marked liking for it. You may regret, if you like, that so many modern musicians should prefer programme music to absolute music; but you cannot settle the big æsthetic problem involved by shrugging your shoulders and invoking Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, nor by airily flinging out a formula or two of moribund æsthetic. And as bad æsthetic, bad argumentation, are accountable for most of the confusion upon the subject, let us try to analyse it more closely down to its foundations.

Programme music--by which we mean purely instrumental (_i.e._ non-vocal) music that has its _raison d'être_ in a definite literary or pictorial scheme--is not an ideal term for this kind of art; but since all names which we can give it are open to objections of some kind, we may as well use this as any other. It must be remembered, too, that though programme or representative music is indeed differentiable from abstract or self-contained music, it is not absolutely differentiable. All programme music must indeed be representative, but it must also be, in part, self-contained; that is, a given phrase must not only be appropriate to the character of Hamlet or Dante, or suggestive of a certain external phenomenon such as the wind, or the fire, or the water, but it must also be interesting _as music_.[20] On the other hand, in thousands of works that have been written without a formal programme, the expression--it may be throughout the work, or only in parts of it--is so vivid, so strenuous, so suggestive of something more than an abstract delight in making a beautiful tone-pattern, that it spontaneously evokes in us images of definite scenes or characters or actions. Surely no one can listen to the C minor symphony, for example, and feel that Beethoven's only concern was with the invention and interweaving of abstract musical themes; here at any rate we feel that there is much truth in Wagner's contention, that behind the mere tones a kind of informal drama is going on. The expression comes, at times, as close to the suggestion of definite thought and definite action as any symphonic poem could do. Thus some of the qualities of programme music are found in absolute music, and _vice versâ_; there is no hard-and-fast line of division between the two. Even in the most mathematical music that ever pedant misconceived, a human accent will sometimes make itself heard; and even the most human music--the music that has its fount and origin and its final justification in the veracious expression of definite human feeling--must be bound together by some mathematical principle of form. But we all understand what we mean by the broad distinction of absolute and poetic music.[21] In the latter we have a definite literary or pictorial scheme controlling (_a_) the shape and colour of the phrases, (_b_) the order in which they appear, (_c_) the way in which they are played off against each other, (_d_) their relative positions at the end. This it is, roughly speaking, that distinguishes it from absolute music, where the manner in which the themes are handled depends upon no conception, external to the themes themselves, that could be phrased in words.

Now we are often told that when music takes upon itself to represent or narrate, as in programme music, it is "stepping beyond its legitimate boundaries." We are told that it is "passing out of its own sphere;" that it is abdicating the purely musical function, and trying to do what it is the function of literature or of painting to do; that a piece of music ought to be comprehensible from its music alone; that its whole message should be written plainly on the music, without the necessity of calling in the aid of a programme. If there is anything in this thesis it will dispose of programme music at once. But I shall try to show that there is nothing whatever in it--that it is not argument, but pure assertion. I shall try to show in the first place that so far from being a passing disease of the present generation, the desire to write programme music is rooted in humanity from the very beginning; and in the second place that the argument just outlined could be made to dispose not only of programme music, but also of the song and the opera.

IV

The late Sidney Lanier, a critic of unusual sanity and freshness of vision, contended that so far from being a late and excrescent growth, programme music is "the very earliest, most familiar, and most spontaneous form of musical composition." We need not go quite so far as this, for it seems to me that it is impossible to date either kind of music first in order of time. Just as one early man placed straight and curved lines in such relations that they pleased the eye by their mere formal harmony, while another placed them in such relations that they pleased by suggesting some aspect of man or nature, so did early music spring with one musician from the mere pleasure in the successions and combinations of tones, with another from the desire to convey in sound a suggestion of the thoughts aroused in him by his intercourse and his struggles with his fellow-men and with the world. Lanier's statement is evidently a slight exaggeration; but I think he has invincible reason with him when he goes on to ask, "What is any song but programme music developed to its furthest extent? A song is ... a double performance; a certain instrument--the human voice--produces a number of tones, none of which have any intellectual value in themselves; but, simultaneously with the production of the tones, words are uttered, each in a physical association with a tone, so as to produce upon the hearer at once the effect of conventional and of unconventional sounds.[22] ... Certainly, if programme music is absurd, all songs are nonsense." This, I think, is the key to the problem. Let us look at it a little more closely.

Let us imagine two primitive men, each with the capacity for expressing feeling in musical sound. One of them manages to find a phrase of a few notes that gives him pleasure. Because it gives him pleasure he repeats it. Having repeated it a number of times he finds the mere repetition of it becoming monotonous; so next time he repeats it in a slightly different way. He now experiences, without understanding why, a subtler form of pleasure. If you told him he was making a very practical demonstration of the law that a great deal of æsthetic delight consists in realising unity in variety, he would not grasp your meaning; but all the same that is what he is doing. He still has his old pleasure in the agreeable succession of tones; but this pleasure is intensified, subtilised, by another--the pleasure of detecting the theme in the disguises it assumes. This primitive man has made the first step towards sonata form; he is assisting at the birth of absolute music. From this root there grows up all our pure delight in agreeable tunes for their own sake, in the embroidery of them, in the juggling with them; in a word, all our delight in absolute music.[23] Now take the other man. He starts along another line. When he begins to trace his rude melodic curve, it is not primarily because he finds an all-absorbing delight in the curve itself. He begins because some definite experience has moved him emotionally, and the emotional disturbance must find an outlet in tone; his melodic curve must suggest the experience. Let us say it is the death of a friend. Here is a much more definite impulse than was acting upon the other man; and it accordingly leads to a more definite expression. The curve the melody takes is now determined not merely by the musical pleasure it gives by going this way or that, but primarily by the need to make the melody representative of a definite feeling, or suggestive of the being or the event that aroused the feeling. _This_ man is at the turn of the road that leads to poetical music--to the song, the opera, and the symphonic poem. (I do not allege, let me say again, that there is an absolute line of demarcation between absolute music and poetic music, or between the states of mind from which they flow; the two are always crossing and re-crossing into each other's territory. I am simply throwing into high relief the element in each that gives it its peculiar significance.) In absolute music, as Wagner pointed out, the essential thing is "the arousing of pleasure in beautiful forms." In poetic music the essential thing is the veracious rendering in tone of an emotion that is as definite as the other is indefinite. Take two concrete examples. The opening phrase of Beethoven's 8th Symphony refers to nothing at all external to itself; it is what Herbert Spencer has called the music of pure exhilaration; to appreciate it you have to think of nothing but itself; the pleasure lies primarily in the way the notes are put together.[24] But the sinister motive that announces the coming of Hunding, in the first act of the _Valkyrie_, appeals to you in a different way. Here your pleasure is only partially due to the particular way the notes go; the other part of it is due to the _veracity_ of the theme, its congruence with the character it is meant to represent. And, to go back to our two primitive men, the first of them was in the mood that would ultimately give birth to the opening of the 8th Symphony, while the second of them was in the mood that would ultimately give birth to the Hunding motive.

Any one who takes the trouble to analyse the phrases of an ordinary symphony and those of a modern song will perceive a broad difference between the kinds of ideas evoked by them. In the old symphony or sonata a succession of notes, pleasing in itself but not having specific reference to actual life--not attempting, that is, to get at very close quarters with strong emotional or dramatic expression, but influencing and affecting us mainly by reason of its purely formal relations and by the purely physical pleasure inherent in it as sound--was stated, varied, worked out and combined with other themes of the same order. Take a thousand of these themes--from Haydn, Mozart, and the early Beethoven, for example--and while they affect you musically you will yet be unable to say that they have taken their rise from any _particular_ emotion, or that they embody any special reflection upon life. It is the peculiarity of music that while on the one hand it may speak almost as definitely as poetry, and refer to things that are cognised intellectually, as in poetry, on the other hand it may make an impression on us, purely as sound, to which the words of poetry, purely as words, can offer no parallel effect. A verse of Tennyson with the words so transposed as to have no intellectual meaning would make no impression when read aloud; no pleasure, that is, would be obtainable merely from the sound of the words themselves. But play the diatonic scale on the piano, or strike a random chord here and there, and though the thing means nothing, the ear is bound to take some pleasure in it. Musical sound gives us pleasure in and by and for itself, independently of our finding even the remotest mental connection between its parts. This connection may be great, or small, or practically non-existent; and the greater it is, of course, the more complicated becomes our pleasure; but it is not essential to our taking physiological delight in music considered purely as sound. Now it is quite possible to construct a lengthy piece of music that shall have absolutely no emotional expression, in the sense of suggesting a reference to human experience--that shall be purely and simply a succession and combination of pleasurable sounds. In the nature of the case, it is clear that not much of the actual music that is written could be of this order throughout. Emotion of some quality and degree is sure to intrude itself here and there into even the most "mathematical" music; but it is quite unquestionable that while some music is alive with suggestions of human interest, of actual man and life, there is an enormous quantity of very pleasant music from which the interest of actuality is wholly absent, that reaches us through physiological rather than through psychological channels, or at any rate, if this is putting it unscientifically, through quite other psychological channels.

Compare with music of this kind the phrases of a highly expressive modern song, or of such a piece as Wagner's _Faust Overture_, or of one of Liszt's or César Franck's symphonic poems. Here the inspiration comes direct from some aspect of external nature or from some actual human experience; and the musical phrase becomes correspondingly modified. While there still remain (1) the physiological pleasure in the theme as sound, and (2) the formal pleasure in the structure, balance, and development of the theme, there is now superadded a third element of interest--the recognition of the veracity of the theme, its appropriateness as an expression of some positive, definite emotion, something seen, some actual experience of men. And music with a content of this kind, it is important to note, can depart widely from the manner of expression and of development of absolute music, and still be interesting. The proof of this is to be had in recitative. Here there is a very wide departure from the more formal music in every quality--melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic. Attempt to play an ordinary piece of recitative as pure music, without the voice and without a knowledge of the words, and its divergence from music of the self-sufficing order generally becomes obvious. The justification of recitative is to be sought not in its compliance with the laws that govern pure non-dramatic instrumental music, but in its congruence with a definite literary idea that is seeking expression through the medium of tone; and our tolerance of it and appreciation of it are due to this supplementing of the somewhat inferior physical pleasure by the superior mental pleasure given by the sense of dramatic truth and fitness. So again in the song. Let any one try to imagine how little the ending of Schubert's _Erl-King_ would suggest to him if he were totally ignorant of the words or the subject of the song, and he will realise how the literary element at once modifies and supports music of this kind. As a piece of absolute music, the final phrase of the _Erl-King_ means nothing at all; it only acquires significance when taken in conjunction with the words; and the justification of its relinquishment of the mode of expression of pure self-sufficing music is precisely its congruence with the literary idea. To go a step further, the phrases typical of Mazeppa in Liszt's symphonic poem, both in themselves and in their development, would probably puzzle us if we met with them in a symphony pure and simple; they only become such marvels of poignant and veracious expression when associated in the mind with Mazeppa. And, to go still further, and to show not from the structure of a theme but from the treatment of it the change that may be induced by a "programme," I may instance the repetitions in the last movement of Tchaikovski's "Pathetic" Symphony, which, though unwarrantable in a symphony of the older pattern, seem to many of us surcharged with the most direct psychological significance. Right through, from recitative to the symphonic poem or the programme symphony, we see that the fusion of the literary or pictorial with the musical interest necessarily leads to a modification of the tissue of the musical theme and of the musical development. You could not, if you would, express the story of Mazeppa in such phrases as those of the "Jupiter." So that, while we thus have an _a priori_ justification of the programme phrase, we begin to understand the difficulties that attend programme development, and some reasons for its many failures in the past. Much of the work that had been done by the older men in consolidating and elaborating the form of the symphony was found to be of little help to the new school. A new type of phrase had to be evolved, and with it a new method of development.

No one, I think, will dispute the broad truth of the principles here laid down. That absolute music _per se_ and vocal or programme music _per se_ have marked psychological differences between them, and that, while the older bent was towards the one, the modern men show a marked preference for the other--these are fairly obvious facts. Hence the necessity of urging it upon the classicists that it will not do to apply the formal rules of the old music to the new _en bloc_, as if they were equally valid in both _genres_. If the modern men reject the classical forms, and try to produce new ones of their own, it can only be because their ideas are not the classical ideas, and must find the investiture most natural and most propitious to them. When Wagner rejected the current opera-form, and strove to attain congruence of the poetical and the musical schemes at all points of his work, the pedants told him that he avoided the long-sanctioned forms because he could not write in them. They did not see that it would have been much less trouble for him, as a mere musician, to shelter himself behind the old forms than to evolve a consistent new one, and that he aimed at a new structure simply because he had something quite new to say. Similarly, when the pedants lay it down that the programmists choose the programme form because it is an easier one to work in than the absolute form, they fail to see how much originality of mind is needed to get veracity of expression in the song or the symphonic poem, where the work, besides having to satisfy our musical sense, will be tested by the standard of the literary utterance or the literary idea with which it deals.

V

Without making too wide a digression into the æsthetics of music, we can see that the tendency to write the one kind of music is as deeply rooted in us as the tendency to write the other kind. Some musicians, by constitutional bias, take the one route, some the other; but neither party has the right to assume that the kind of music it prefers is the only kind. Hence it is an error to say that music is stepping out of her own province when she becomes programme music. Her real province includes both absolute and programme music; the one is as inherent in us as the other.

But for reasons that will become apparent later, the absolute branch of the art developed more rapidly than the poetical branch. Even by the time absolute music had come to its magnificent climax in Beethoven, programme music had really done nothing at all of any permanent value. Many composers seemed to have a vague idea that purely instrumental music _could_ be made to convey suggestions of real life just as poetry does, and just as the song does; but they had not yet learned where to begin and where to end, what was worth doing in this line and what was not worth doing. Their attempts at programme music were mostly crude imitations of external things, in a language not yet rich enough to express what they wanted to say; they contain, for our ears, rather too much programme and rather too little music. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the minds of the men who tried to write poetic music for instruments alone, ran in two main directions. They either wrote pieces musically interesting in themselves, and gave them fanciful titles, such as "Diana in the wood," "The virtuous coquette," "Juno, or the jealous woman," and so on, or they frankly began with the intention of representing appearances and events in music. Thus in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book we have pieces with the titles, "Faire wether," "Calm wether," "Lightening," "Thunder," and "A clear day." These things were not confined to one country; they are met with all over Europe. Occasionally the programme writers worked through vocal as well as instrumental forms. Muffat wrote pieces of the "Diana in the wood" order. Jannequin described the battle of Malegnano in music, Hermann the battle of Pavia. In the seventeenth century Carlo Farina wrote orchestral pieces in which the voices of animals were imitated. Buxtehude wrote seven klavier-suites, describing in music the nature and quality of the seven planets. Frescobaldi did a battle capriccio. Frohberger wrote a suite showing the Emperor Ferdinand IV. making his way up into heaven along Jacob's ladder. Frohberger, indeed, was realistic beyond the average. He not only painted nature, for example, but indicated the locality as accurately as a geography or a guide-book could do; and it was not merely humanity in general that moved about among his scenes, but the Count this or the Prince that. In some suites, that are unfortunately lost to an admiring world, he painted a storm on the Dover-Calais route, and gave a series of pictures of what befell the Count von Thurn in a perilous journey down the Rhine.[25]

All this seems very crude now, but the very prevalence of the practice points to a widespread feeling in those times that music _could_ be made to serve as an art of representation. Indeed, a much earlier example of this tendency can be quoted, showing that even the ancient Greeks had their programme-music writers. There is a passage in the Geography of Strabo, in which he describes what he heard at Delphi. Here, he says, they had a musical contest "of players on the cithara, who executed a pæan in honour of Apollo. The players on the cithara were accompanied by players on the flute, and by citharists, who performed without singing. They performed a melos (strain) called the Pythian mood. It consisted of five parts--the anacrusis, the ampeira, cataceleusmus, iambics and dactyls, and pipes. Timosthenes, the commander of the fleet of the second Ptolemy, and who was the author of a work in ten books on Harbours, composed a melos. His object was to celebrate in this melos the contest of Apollo with the serpent Python. The anacrusis was intended to express the prelude; the ampeira, the first onset of the contest; the cataceleusmus, the contest itself; the iambics and dactyls denoted the triumphal strain on obtaining the victory, together with musical measures of which the dactyl is peculiarly appropriated to praise and the iambics to insult and reproach; the syrinxes and pipes described the death, the players imitating the hissings of the expiring monster."[26] The unsympathetic may say it is to be hoped that the gentleman was a better admiral than he seems to have been a musician.

But to get back to modern Europe again. These crude imitations of birds and beasts and the rolling of the waves are not programme music; they are the rawest part of the raw material out of which programme music is made. The difficulty is to make the piece interesting both as music, and as a representation of what it purports to describe. A composer may fling a phrase before us and tell us this represents Hamlet, or Othello, or a death-rattle, or the Israelites crossing the Red Sea, or anything else he likes; but unless the phrase has an interest of its own, and unless he can satisfy our musical as well as our literary sense by the way he handles and combines and transforms it in the sequel, he will not arrest our attention. The great problem, indeed, of both the modern symphonic poem and the modern opera is to tell a story adequately and at the same time to satisfy our desire for interesting musical development. If the composer fixes his attention too exclusively on the literary part of his subject, his work will lack organic _musical_ unity; if he is too intent on achieving this, he will probably fail in dramatic definiteness. This, I shall soon try to show, is really the crux both of opera and of programme music; and if _we_ rarely succeed in solving so knotty a problem, it is not to be wondered at that the solution did not come to the men of the sixteenth or seventeenth or eighteenth century.

As a matter of fact, however, one old composer _did_ try to effect a union of the programme purpose with some real sense of musical form. This was Johann Kuhnau (1660?-1722), who, in his six Bible Sonatas, describes "the fight between David and Goliath," "the melancholy of Saul being dissipated by music," "the marriage of Jacob," and so on. Kuhnau was a really remarkable man. He was a good musician who could write interesting clavier-pieces apart from any programme scheme. He was moreover a keen-witted man who tried to think out seriously the problem of the union of musical expression and poetical purpose, so far as any man in those days could do so. In the preface to the Bible Sonatas he points out that the musician, like the poet, prose-writer, and painter, often wants to turn his hearers thoughts in a particular direction. If he wants to express in his music not merely sadness but the sadness of this or that individual--to distinguish, as he says, a sad Hezekiah from a weeping Peter or a lamenting Jeremiah--he must employ words in order to make the emotion definite. But not necessarily, be it observed, by writing the music _to_ the words, as in a song. His own plan is to illustrate his subject in music, and make his poetic purpose clear to us by giving a detailed verbal account of it. Thus he prefaces each of his Bible Sonatas with an elaborate account of the event it deals with, and then summarises the main motives. This, for example, is the summary of the first Sonata, after a long general introduction. The Sonata expresses, he says--

1. The stamping and bravado of Goliath.

2. The trembling of the Israelites, and their prayer to God at sight
of their awful enemy.

3. The courage of David, his desire to break the proud spirit of the
giant, and his childlike trust in God's help.

4. The contest of words between David and Goliath, and the contest
itself, in which Goliath is wounded in the forehead by the stone,
falls down, and is slain.

5. The flight of the Philistines, and how they are pursued by the
Israelites, and slaughtered with the sword.

6. The jubilation of the Israelites over the victory.

7. The chorus of the women in praise of David.

8. And, finally, the general joy, finding vent in vigorous dancing and
leaping.

It will be seen at once that the programme here is of a different kind from those of some of Kuhnau's predecessors and contemporaries. It does indeed aim at representing some external things--such as the stamping of Goliath, the impact of the stone against his head, and so on--but they are not inherently absurd or impossible; while he gives a great deal of his space to the really emotional moments of the story. Throughout the sonatas, however, it is the poetic purpose that directs the music, determining both expression, sequence, and form. Every episode that occurs in the story has to be represented in the music; and Kuhnau is careful to print, in his score, the verbal indication at the precise point where the music follows it. He tells us the exact bar at which the stone is aimed at Goliath, and the bar in which the giant falls down; where Laban begins to practise his deceit on Jacob, where Jacob is "amorous and contented," and where "his heart warns him that something is wrong"; and so on--thereby setting an example to composers like Strauss, who foolishly give the purchaser of such a score as _Till Eulenspiegel_ no guide to the various adventures of the hero. Some of Kuhnau's devices provoke a smile, as in the Fifth Sonata--"Gideon, the Saviour of the People of Israel." The sign to Gideon was that the fleece was to be wet with dew, but the ground dry; the next night the ground was to be wet and the fleece dry. Kuhnau naïvely expresses the second sign by giving the theme of the first sign in contrary motion. But all _naïvetés_ apart, a great deal of the music of the Sonatas is very fine; and it is noteworthy that Kuhnau points out, in his general preface, that the writer of programme music must be allowed more liberty than the absolutist to break a traditional "law" when the expression demands it.[27] Kuhnau, indeed, was on the right path. He was a man born before his due time; had he lived in our days, and had at his command all the resources of modern expression and our enormous orchestras, he might have taken up very much the same position towards music as the modern programmists.

John Sebastian Bach, who succeeded Kuhnau at the Thomas Church in Leipzig, made one, and only one, experiment in the same line. This was the "Capriccio on the departure of my dearly beloved brother." The first movement, he says, depicts "The cajoleries of friends, trying to induce him to give up the idea of the journey"; the second is "a representation of the various things that may happen to him in foreign lands"; the third gives utterance to a "general lament of his friends as they say good-bye to him"; and the finale is a fugue on the postillion's signal.

Bach, however, made no further attempt to develop along these lines. The work _he_ had been sent into the world to do was of another order.

About the same time Couperin, in France, was cultivating the programme _genre_ with some success. He not only wrote harmless little things with titles like "La Galante," but also connected pieces of musical delineation, such as "The Pilgrims." Like Kuhnau, he justified his principles in a preface. "In the composition of my pieces," he says, "I have always a definite object or matter before my eyes. The titles of my pieces correspond to these occasions. Each piece is a kind of portrait."

In Rameau again, we get such things as "Sighs," "Tender Plaints," "The Joyous Girl," "The Cyclops," etc.; and at a slightly later date Dittersdorf (1739-1799) wrote twelve programme symphonies, illustrating Ovid's "Metamorphoses" and "The War of Human Passions."

Mozart's father wrote a musical description of a sledge-journey, in which the ladies are represented shivering with the cold; but Mozart himself avoided the programme form as positively as Bach. Haydn, however, dabbled in it more extensively, as I have already pointed out.

Beethoven's position in the history of programme music is somewhat peculiar. Just about that time, when the Napoleonic wars had familiarised every one with the pomp of armies, there was a perfect deluge of battle pieces. There was probably not a battle of any importance in those days that had not a fantasia written upon it, each differing from the others in little else but its title. In a weak moment Beethoven succumbed to the general temptation and wrote his "Battle of Vittoria," which is not only one of the least significant of his works, but one of the least significant works in the history of programme music. Beethoven's real contributions to this form of art were indirect rather than direct. He told one of his friends that he had always a picture in his mind when composing; and if this could be taken quite literally, it would seem as if we were on the trail of programme music pure and simple. But we shall probably never know the extent to which Beethoven relied on poetic suggestions for his musical inspiration; and if we look at the internal evidence of his music, we shall see that although it often deals with poetic subjects, it treats them from the standpoint of the old forms rather than from that of the new. So far as their intellectual origin is concerned, the superb _Leonora_, _Egmont_, and _Coriolan_ overtures are poetic music; that is, they aim, in a musical texture, at sketching a character or telling a story. But so far as the form is concerned in which the composer has chosen to work, the procedure is determined almost entirely by the laws of absolute music. Wagner has drawn attention to this in a well-known passage in his essay on "Liszt's Symphonic Poems." He shows what the formal laws of the old symphony were, and how necessary they were to give logical coherence to abstract music. But, he says, when these laws were applied uncompromisingly to a different kind of art-work--the overture--a disturbance occurred at once between the aims of the overture and the demands of the symphonic form. All that the latter was concerned with was _change_--the constant representation of themes in new lights. The overture had, in addition to this, to concern itself with dramatic development. "Now it will be obvious," he says, "that, in the conflict of a dramatic idea with this form, the necessity must at once arise either to sacrifice the development (the idea) to the alternation (the form), or the latter to the former." He goes on to praise Gluck's _Iphigenia in Aulis_ overture for the skilful way it keeps the dramatic development from being spoiled by compliance with extraneous laws of form. Then, he says, Beethoven, working on a bigger scale and with a more stupendous imagination than Gluck, nevertheless came to grief on the rock Gluck managed to escape. "He who has eyes," says Wagner, "may see precisely by this overture (_i.e._ the great _Leonora No. 3_), how detrimental to the master the maintenance of the traditional form was bound to be. For who, at all capable of understanding such a work, will not agree with me when I assert that the repetition of the first part, after the middle section, is a weakness which distorts the idea of the work almost past all understanding; and that the more, as everywhere else, and particularly in the coda, the master is obviously governed by nothing but the dramatic development. But whoso has brains and lack of prejudice enough to see this, will have to admit that the evil could only have been avoided by entirely giving up that repetition; an abandonment, however, which would have done away with the overture-form--_i.e._ the original, merely suggestive, symphonic dance-form--and have constituted the departure-point for creating a new form."

Wagner is undoubtedly right. Beethoven hovered uncertainly at times between the demands of poetic expression and the demands of absolute form. To write poetic music pure and simple, of course, was not his mission in the world. That was reserved for other men. One side of his powerful genius was to be taken up by Wagner and pushed to its logical conclusion in the music-drama. Another side, cultivated by Berlioz, Liszt, and Richard Strauss, comes to its logical end in the symphonic poem; and just as Wagner criticised the Beethoven overture from the standpoint of music-drama, I propose, shortly, to criticise Wagner from the standpoint of the symphonic poem. I shall try to show that so far from the Wagnerian opera representing, as Wagner thought, the ideal after which the music of Beethoven was striving, it is really only a transitional form; and that the symphonic poem is the completely satisfactory, completely logical form, to which the Wagnerian opera stands in the same relation as the _Leonora_ overture does to _Tristan and Isolde_.

VI

Before embarking on this æsthetic argument, however, let us briefly conclude our historical view of the development of programme music. It was with the Romantic movement that the infusion of poetry into music became complete, and at the same time the vocabulary and the colour-range of music became adequate to express all kinds of literary and pictorial ideas. The older musicians could not, if they had tried, have written the modern symphonic poem or the modern song. And this for several reasons. In the first place, they were pretty fully occupied with making music the language it now is; they had to form a vocabulary and think out principles of architecture; and the last thing they could have done was to leave the safe and formal lines of their own art--safe because they were precise and formal--and plunge into a mode of expression that would have seemed to them to offer no coherence, no guiding principle. In the second place, they lacked one of the main stimuli to the development of modern programme music, the suggestion of a vivid, living, modern, highly emotional and picturesque poetry. A Schumann, a Brahms, a Franz could not have written such songs as they have done in any century but this; for the mainspring of their songs has been the emotional possibilities contained in the words. It was only when composers really felt the deepest artistic interest in the words they were setting, instead of regarding them as merely a frame for musical embroidery, that they attained the modern veracity and directness of phrase. You cannot do much more with words like those of the older song or opera than set them with a view to their purely musical rather than their musico-poetical possibilities; and if you persist, out of deference to a foolish tradition, in setting to music the words of a foreign and relatively unfamiliar language, you will perforce become more and more conventional in your phrases and in your general structure. It was the peculiar advantage of the modern German song-writers that they could set lyrics of their own language, alive with every suggestion that could lend itself to musical treatment. The emotion was intense, the form concentrated and direct, the idea definite and concise; and the musicians, having by this time a fully developed language for their use, set themselves to reproduce these qualities of the poem in their music. Hence the new spirit that came into music with the Romantic movement, and that reacted on opera, on piano music, and on the symphonic poem.

Another great difference between the pre-Romantic and the post-Romantic composers was that the latter were, on the whole, much more cultured men than the former. This was due, of course, not to any particular merit of their own, but to the changed social circumstances of the musician. The system of patronage in the eighteenth century, while it undoubtedly helped the musician to develop _as_ a musician, must have retarded his development in other ways. Under that system, where he was often little better than the servant of some aristocrat, he must often have been debarred from studying the world at first-hand, meeting it face to face, looking at it through his own eyes. Neither Haydn[28] nor Mozart, for example, stood on the level of the best culture of the time. The great German historian of music, Ambros, has pointed out how, in Mozart's letters from Italy, the talk is all of the singers and dancers; "he scarcely seems to have noticed the Coliseum and the Vatican, with all that these contain." And Ambros goes on to say that the modern musician reads his Shakespeare and his Sophocles in the original, and knows them almost by heart. He reads Humboldt's Cosmos and the histories of Niebuhr and Ranke; he studies the dialectic of Hegel as well as, or perhaps more than, the art of fugue; and if he goes to Italy he does not trouble himself about the opera, but occupies himself with nature and the remains of classic art. He is, in fact, says Ambros, "Herr Microcosmos."[29]

For a fair picture of the ordinary life of a musician in the house of his patron in the eighteenth century we have only to turn to the Autobiography of Dittersdorf. Among them all, indeed, Gluck and Handel seem to be the only musicians who possessed much culture,[30] and who strike us as being, apart from music, the intellectual equal of the great men of the time--of Voltaire, Rousseau, Condorcet, Diderot, Lessing, and the rest. There is no evidence that Beethoven was either a man of wide culture, or a respectable thinker outside his own art. It is, indeed, probable that the enormous musical power of many of these men, and the centuries of progress through which they rushed music in comparatively a few years, was due to their being nothing else but musicians, to the concentration of all their faculties, all their experiences, upon the problem of making sound a complete, living, flexible medium of expression. But the later musicians were of another order. The Romantic movement bred a new type of musician. He no longer sat in the music-room of an aristocrat, clothed in the aristocrat's livery, and spun music out of his own inner consciousness. He moved about in the world and saw and learned a good deal. He associated with poets; he frequented the studios of painters. We get men like Hoffmann, at once novelist, painter, musician, and critic; like Liszt, pianist, composer, author; like Schumann, musician and musical critic; like Wagner, ranging greedily over the whole field of human knowledge, and mixing himself up--in more senses than one--with every possible and impossible subject under the sun. I am not using the term in any offensive or disparaging sense when I say that the average modern musician, in matters outside music, is a much better educated and more all-round man than his predecessor; he knows more, sees more, reads more, thinks more. Men like Wagner, Brahms, Richard Strauss, Hugo Wolf, and Bruneau, stand much closer to the general intellectual life of their day than any of the older musicians did to the intellectual life of _his_ day. I am not for a moment contending that they are any greater _musicians_ merely on this account; I simply state it as a psychological factor in their work, as something that determines, to a great extent, the quality of that work, and certainly determines their choice of subjects.

The way it does this is by making them anxious to express in their music all the impressions they have gathered from the world and from their culture. But in order that they might do this, two things were necessary, as we have already seen. The vocabulary of music--its range of melody and harmony--had to be increased, and the capacity of the orchestra had to be enormously developed. It is folly to laugh at the men of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for not getting on further with poetical music. They had not the means at their disposal to do so. Sonata-form grew up to a great extent on the piano and the violin; and the nature of these instruments largely determined what could and should be uttered upon them. It was not till harmony got richer and deeper and fuller, and men had learned to extract all kinds of expression from the orchestra, that programme music in the true sense of the word became possible.