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Page 86
There is one side of music which I am convinced has never
been fully studied, namely, the relation between it and
declamation. As we know, music is a language which may delineate
actual occurrences by means of onomatopoetic sounds. By the
use of more or less suggestive sounds, it may bring before
our minds a quasi-visual image of things which we more or less
definitely feel.
Now to do all this, there must be rules; or, to put it more
broadly, there must be some innate quality that enables
this art of sounds to move in sympathy with our feelings.
I have no wish to go into detailed analysis of the subject;
but a superficial survey of it may clear up certain points with
regard to the potency of music that we are too often willing
to refer back to the mere pleasing physical sensations of sound.
Some consideration of this subject may enable us to understand
the much discussed question of programme music. It may also help
us to recognize the astonishing advance we have made in the art;
an advance, which, strange to say, consists in successively
throwing off all the trammels and conventionalities of what is
generally considered artificial, and the striking development
of an art which, with all its astounding wealth of exterior
means, aims at the expression of elemental sensations.
Music may be divided into four classes, each class marking
an advance in receptive power on the part of the listener and
poetic subtlety on that of the composer. We may liken the first
stage to that of the savage Indians who depict their exploits
in war and peace on the rocks, fragments of bone, etc. If the
painter has in mind, say, an elephant, he carves it so that its
principal characteristics are vastly exaggerated. A god in such
delineation is twice the size of the ordinary man, and so it is
in descriptive music. For instance, in Beethoven's "Pastoral"
symphony, the cuckoo is not a bird which mysteriously hides
itself far away in a thicket, the sound of whose voice comes to
one like a strange, abrupt call from the darkness of the forest;
no, it is unmistakably a cuckoo, reminding one strangely of
those equally advanced and extremely cheap art products of
Nuremberg, made of pine wood, and furnished with a movable tail.
The next stage is still a question of delineation; but
of delineation that leads us into strange countries, and
the sounds we hear are but the small door through which we
pass. This music _suggests_; by way of example, the opening of
the last movement of the "Pastoral" symphony, the march from
Tcha�kovsky's "Symphonie Path�tique," the opening of Raff's
"Im Walde," and Goldmark's "Sakuntala." Such music hints,
and there is a certain potency in its suggestion which makes
us see things. These two divisions of music have been termed
"programme" or "objective" music.
The other two classes of music have been termed subjective.
The first is declamation, pure and simple; the singer may be
telling a lie, or his sentiment may be insincere or false; what
these sounds stand for, we know from the words, their grade of
passion, etc. The last phase of our art is much more subtle,
and is not amenable to such accurate analysis. If we may liken
music to painting, we may, I think, compare the latter to the
first three stages of this new language of music; but it can
go no further. For that art must touch its audience through
a palpable delineation of something more or less material;
whereas music is of the stuff dreams are made of. It is hardly
necessary to say, however, that our dreams are often much more
poignant than the actual sensations caused by real occurrences
would be. And it is because of this strange quality, I think,
that dreams and music affect us in much the same manner.
The vital principle of Wagner's art was that he not only made
startlingly vivid pictures in his music, but that he made the
people in these pictures actually walk out of the frame and
directly address the audience. In other words, his orchestra
forms a kind of pictorial and psychological background from
which his characters detach themselves and actually speak. If
they speak falsely, the ever present orchestra, forming as it
were a halo, unmercifully tears away the mask, like the mirror
in old fairy tales.
In Wagner's operas, however, the intrusion of gross palpable
machinery of the stage, as well as that of the actor's art,
too often clouds the perfect working of this wonderful art
conception. It is just this intrusion of materialism in Wagner's
music dramas which constitutes their only weakness.
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