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Page 87
At this point I wish to insist upon the fact that in music it
is always through declamation that the public is addressed most
directly; not only that, but declamation is not necessarily tied
by any of the fetters of the spoken word; nor is it subservient
to any of the laws of articulate speech as we meet with them in
language. This being admitted, I have no hesitation in giving
my opinion that opera, or rather the music drama, is not the
highest or the most perfect form of our art. The music drama
as represented by Wagner (and he alone represents it) is the
most perfect union of painting, poetry, and music imaginable to
our nineteenth-century minds. But as regards representing the
highest development of music, I find it too much hampered by
the externals of art, necessary materialism in the production
of palpable acts, and its enforced subjection to the laws that
govern the spoken word.
Music is universal; Wagner's operas, by the inherent necessities
of speech, are necessarily and irrevocably Germanic. "Les
Maitres Chanteurs," "The Dwarfs of Niebelheim," "Elizabeta,"
are impossibilities, whereas, for instance, Beethoven's "Eroica"
labours under no such disadvantage. "Goodbye, My Dearest Swan,"
invests part of "Lohengrin" with a certain grotesque colour
that no one would ever dream of if there were no necessity for
the singer to be tied down to the exigencies of palpable and
certainly most materialistic language. The thought in itself
is beautiful, but the necessity for the words drags it into
the mud.
This certainly shows the difference between the language of
music and what is called articulate speech, the purely symbolic
and artificial character of the latter, and the direct,
unhampered utterance of the former. Music can invariably
heighten the poignancy of mere spoken words (which mean
nothing in themselves), but words can but rarely, in fact I
doubt whether they can ever, heighten the effect of musical
declamation. To my mind, listening to Wagner's operas may be
likened to watching a circus with three rings. That containing
the music should have our closest attention, for it offers
the most wonderful sounds ever imagined by any man. At the
same time it is impossible for any human being not to have his
attention often lured away to the other rings, in one of which
Fricke's rams vie with the bird and the dragon; or where the
phantom ship seems as firmly fixed as the practical rainbow,
which so closely betrays the carpenter. In the other ring you
can actually hear the dull jokes of Mimi and the Wanderer,
or hear Walther explain that he has passed a comfortable night
and slept well.
The music to these remarkable scenes, however, does not deign
to stoop so low, but soars in wonderful poetry by itself, thus
rejecting a union which, to speak in the jargon of our day, is
one of the convincing symptoms of decadence; in other words,
it springs from the same impulse as that which has produced
the circus with three rings.
Summing up, I wish to state what I consider the four elements
of music, namely, music that paints, music that suggests, music
that actually speaks, and music that almost defies analysis,
and is composed of the other three elements.
When we were considering the early works for harpsichord, I said
that music could define certain things with quite reasonable
exactitude. Just as in the Egyptian hieroglyphics a wavy line
stands for water, so it can in music, with the latitude that
it can mean anything in nature that we might consider of the
same genre. Thus, the figure in Wagner's "Waldweben" means in
that instance waves of air, and we know it by the context.
His swaying figure of the "Prelude to Rheingold" is as
plainly water as is the same figure used by Mendelssohn in his
"Lovely Melusina." Not that Wagner plagiarized, but that he and
Mendelssohn recognized the definiteness of musical suggestions;
which is more than proved by their adopting the same musical
ideas to indicate the same things.
More indefinite is the analysis of our second type or element
of music. The successful recognition of this depends not only
upon the susceptibility of the hearer to delicate shades of
sensation, but also upon the receptivity of the hearer and his
power to accept freely and unrestrictedly the mood shadowed
forth by the composer. Such music cannot be looked upon
objectively. To those who would analyze it in such a manner it
must remain an unknown language; its potency depends entirely
upon a state of willing subjectivity on the part of the hearer.
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