Richard Wagner and the music of the future : History and aesthetics

Preface

A CONSIDERABLE part of the contents of the present volume has been previously published in the ‘Fortnightly Review ;’ a smaller portion, consisting chiefly of the letters of R. Schumann, appeared in the ‘Academy.’ Everything, however, has been recast and made subservient to the purposes of this book, about which the author now begs leave to make a few introductory remarks. Musicians and theorists of all colours: (for nowa-days one must distinguish the different shades of party opinion, in music as well as in politics or religion) agree in the one point, that, by the works of Beethoven's latter years, and especially by the Ninth Symphony of that master, a new phase is marked in the history of their art. In the last-mentioned work, or, to speak quite accurately, in its three first movements, it was finally shown, how far music in its separate condition could g0 ie % achieving the ultimate aim of all art, i.é., the rer re iv PREFACE.

ing of the emotions of the human heart. It may in this respect be called the triumph of absolute music; and, indeed, no symphonic work of a later period can be said to have surpassed, or even equalled in beauty and power of expression, this gigantic effort of a master-mind. But in this very splendour of artistic perfection we indistinctly, but no less certainly, feel the want of something that remains unexpressed ; and by acknowledging this want, as founded in the nature of music itself, and introducing into the last movement of his D minor symphony the human word, as a firm basis for his lofty aspirations, Beethoven has at the same time ushered in a new period of his art.

To define the sesthetical foundation of this new idea in music, and at the same time follow the course of its growth, will be my chief task in the following pages. . Here I will only try to indicate in a few words its most general characteristics, and first of all to fix its nondescript airiness into a local habitation anda name. The new movement, therefore, which arose after and, to a great extent, through Beethoven’s reformatory deeds, we will henceforth call the period of poetic music (the strict definition of which term I must defer to another occasion) ; or, In case the reader should prefer an orien nent ti in em A ee

I ry ogee - --

PREFACE. V old to a new-coined expression, we will occasionally apply the generally acknowledged sodriquet of the

Music of the Future.

The poetic principle, alluded to, may be divided into a lyrical and a dramatic part; which distinction, translated into musical terms, will lead us to the two important forms of the Music-Drama and the Song. At the same time it seems to me that only in these two kinds of development music shows a decided advance upon Beethoven’s creations, a_ remark which, of course, is made without any derogatory tendency with regard to the instrumental works of modern composers. In many cases these have displayed individual beauties of the highest order without, however, adding essentially new features to the symphonic form, as established by Beethoven.

As a further means of subdivision, I have headed the single chapters of my work with the representative names of Richard Wagner for the dramatic, and Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, and Robert Franz for the different shades of the lyrical phase of modern music.

I. Ghe Drama

“ Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of heaven’s joy, Sphere-born harmonious sisters, Voice and Verse, Wed your divine sounds, and mix’d power employ, Dead things with inbreath’d sense able to pierce.”

Milton.

Chapter I. Richard Wagner

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Ir I were asked for a striking point of distinction between musicians of the oid and modern schools, I should mention, first of all, their essentially altered position with regard to literature in "general. During the last century, a musician was ol expected to study, from his very childhood, all es intricacies, both theoretical and practical, of his art, but beyond this his education, as a rule, showed the most deplorable deficiencies ; and whenever he had to write on ordinary foolscap, instead f the accustomed staff of five lines, his hand seomed to shake and his thought to stammer. Mozart, for instance, seems to have been decidedly en not above the average level of middle-class education at his time; and to connect the idea of a thinker with good old ‘“‘papa Haydn,’’? who, while composing his Creation, used to mumble a couple of ‘Ave Maria’s’ when the source of his inspiration ceased to flow, seems grotesquely incongruous. Indeed, with the sole exception of Gluck, no firstrate musician of the eighteenth century can be named who would not have shrunk from the idea of giving literary evidence as to the fundamental principles of his own art; a phenomenon which, in most cases, finds its explanation in the men- _ tioned circumstance of an exclusively technical education. Becthoven’s youth also was passed in a purely professional atmosphere; but his powerful mind soon expanded with interests of a wider range. Plutarch was his favourite author, and verses of Homer were frequently found, interspersed with those puzzling economical calculations and musical sketches which covered the walls of his room and the scraps of paper on his writing-table. His esthetical thoughts also dis. ”

play the intuitive depth of his great nature. Still ” the language of illiterate awkwardness in whiak they were clad, as far, at least, as we may judge from Schindler’s account, distinctly shows a want of early training.

We receive a very different impression as we turn to the literary capabilities of representative modern composers. It is true that Mendelssohn refrained, on principle, from untraditional theoretic utterances, although the fluent grace of his style shows to great advantage in his private letters. But Schumann went through a regular course of university studies, and after that was the editor of a musical journal for many years, before his name as a composer became known beyond the circle of his immediate admirers. The literary style of Liszt too reflects clearly the suppleness and grace of his refined genius, although, in his case, one might suppose that the unequalled mastery of his instrument, which he displayed as enfant prodige from his earliest youth, would have engrossed the attention even of the most precocious intellect.

These few remarks seemed required to assist the reader in seeing in its true light one of the numerous accusations which Wagner’s innumerable

enemies have raised against his creative power. It

is grounded on the fact of his having investigated B 2 et NR ean ; ~ ae | - { ad , so the metaphysical and historical sides of his art.

The two faculties of speculation and execution— these wise men assert—are never found combined in the same individuality, and on the strength of this axiom, they prove a priori that the author of Oper und Drama cannot but produce works of cold deliberation,, which, based on _ theoretical speculation, may occasionally attain effects of skill, but must needs lack the life of spontaneous production. To refute the arguments of such theorists by the intrinsic value of Wagner’s creations would be in vain, as these appeal altogether to a higher kind of receptive faculty, than is to be found amongst the high-priests of orthodox —

Philistinism. Such men never will or can conceive that, in art, as well as in life, we must distinguish between the state of Paradisiac innocence and that of self-conscious knowledge. In the former the feelings are poured forth with almost childlike naiveté; and if the mind from which they flow draws its sources from the inexhaustible fountain of beauty, they will possess all the charms of virginity. Mozart might be named as the representative genius of this kind of delightfully fresh spontaneity. Unfortunately, the times of juvenile enjoyment have been changed for the manhood of deeper thought and sorrow. We have tasted the bitter fruit of knowledge, and the artists of our latter days must have passed with us through the furnace of “fierce and unfathomable thought,” purifying in it the inarticulate longings of the soul, to the not less passionate but conscious strife for ideal aims. Beethoven and Wagner are the artists by whose names the philosophical, and therefore essentially modern, epoch of music will be recognised. By these re- _ marks, however, it shall by no means be implied that the works of Wagner or Beethoven are not the emanation of spontaneous production, but have been fashioned after a certain scheme, the result of previous speculation. In Wagner’s case the futility of such an accusation can easily be proved by chronological dates. He himself has told us how ‘unintentionally ” (uwnvorsdtzlich) he entered. upon his career as a reformer in the Flying Dutehman. This work, Taunnhduser, and Lohengrin were finished, and even the scheme of the words of Siegfried and the Mezstersinger conceived and partly executed, before his first theoretical work, the

Kunstwerk der Zukunft, saw the light. It is indeed one of the most interesting studies of musical history to see how the new idea in all its consequences grew upon Wagner, and how he embodied it unconsciously in his dramatic creations, which only afterwards, like the works of any other composer, served him as material for his researches. ‘The great importance of these theoretic writings lies, for us, in the fact of their being the only way in which a full understanding of Wagner’s aims, and further, of those of modern music in general, can be obtained. : Germany is the country of music and philosophy, but the philosophy of music has been treated by most of its deepest thinkers with an undeserved — and equally unaccountable neglect. Even a man of Leibnitz’s pre-eminence saw in music only an “exercitium arithmetice occultum nescientis se numerare animi,” although the works of his contemporaries, Bach and Handel, might have taught him better. Hegel’s views on the same subject cannot be said to enlighten the mind to any considerable extent, and in our own time Friedrich Vischer, the

“Aesthetiker”’ par excellence, confessed his own igno-

-rance of music in a double way, first by not treating it himself in his principal work, and secondly by choosing Dr. Hanslick as his substitute. Arthur Schopenhauer, the greatest thinker Germany has produced since Kant, was the first to pierce the clouds hanging around this most ethereal art. There is a certain likeness between the characters of Wagner and Schopenhauer as writers, and equally between the positions which they take in the history of their respective branches of human development. Both acknowledge one and only one, of their predecessors as their superior, whose ideas they are destined to earry out. In this exclusive admiration of Beethoven and Kant, on the part of Wagner and Schopenhauer, lies at the same time the cause for their frequently unjust contempt of epigonic aspirations and the bitter- ' ness of their critical utterances. Perhaps such onesidedness and misunderstanding of individualities not strictly akin to their own is inevitably the doom of creative minds; but only too often it leads to a fatal isolation from the stream of contemporary progress. The bitter resentment on the part of the objects concerned is another disadvantage of such reformatory zeal. The flaying of Marsyas, —wretched singer though he may have been,— seemed to me always the least enviable part of —

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Apollo’s career. In both Wagner’s and Schopenhauer’s cases the numerous victims of their wrath agreed upon a system of self-defence and revenge, in which the positive and negative weapons of abuse, and even more pernicious silence, were handled with considerable skill, and the temporary success of which showed the influential position of the Marsyas tribe in the literary community. - The consequence was, that of Schopenhauer’s standard work scarcely two editions were sold in almost half a century, while the immense importance of Wagner’s ideas is only just now, after a painful struggle of more than thirty years, beginning to dawn upon his own nation. - It is perhaps partly owing to this affinity of character that Wagner adopted, with slight modifications, the great. pessimist’s views on the ideal basis of music. Into Schopenhauer’s views, as contained in ‘The World as Will and Imagination,’ we therefore now must enter a little more fully. The great discovery of Kant, in the ‘Critique of Pure Reason,’ is the doctrine that the outer world, or what we call the universe, appeals to our senses — only by means of its phenomenon. About the real essence, the noumenon of this world, as it

DA ee Satay might appear to beings with other means of perception than ours, and not limited by the notions of space and time, nothing is revealed to us. Even these notions originate, according to Kant, in a certain predisposition of the brain, by means of which we discern the co-existence and succession of different phenomena and the phenomena themselves. Against the absolute idealism of Berkeley, _ Kant holds that, outside the human Ego, there must exist an independent something to act upon the - individual. Schopenhauer, starting from this basis, proceeds to the further assertion that this some- | thing hitherto nondescript, exists only in so far as it has the ‘‘ will of existence; ” in fact, that it is nothing else but this will in its different forms and . phases. The highest and last of these phases is the human volition, made conscious of its being and aims by the intellect, and comprising in its microcosm the universe out of which it grows, and from which it differs gradually but not essentially. The first manifestation of this will, Schopenhauer proceeds, takes place in the ideas in Plato’s sense, .—that is, in the archetypal forms which fashion the cosmos, and of which the single phenomena are further subdivisions. It is the aim of all arts to,express the eternal essence of things by means: of these Platonic ideas, only music takes in this respect an exceptional position. Arts like painting and sculpture embody these ideas, as conceived by ~ the artist through the medium of phenomena, the ideal value of which he shows, but only by the reproduction of their actual appearance. Even in poetry the realities of life and the visible wonders. of the world, with their symbolic meaning, form an essential ingredient. Music, on the contrary, does not want, nor even allow of, a realistic conception. There is no sound in nature fit to serve the musician as a model, or to supply him with more than an occasional suggestion for his sublime purpose. He approaches. the original sources of existence more closely than all other artists— nay, even than Nature herself. His harmonies. and melodies are, to speak with Schopenhauer, “as immediate and direct an objectification or copy. of the will of the world as the world itself is, as the ideas are of which the universe of things. is the phenomenon. Music is not the copy of the ideas, ike the other arts, but a representation of, the cosmical will co-ordinate with the ideas them-. _ selves.” In this sense the musical composer is the 3

RICHARD WAGNER. TI only creative artist. While the painter or sculptor must borrow the raiment for his idea from the human form or the landscape, the musician is alone with his inspiration. He only listens to the voice: - of the spirit of the world, or, which is the same, of his own spirit speaking to him as in a dream; for it is only in dreams, when the soul is not disturbed by the impression of the senses, that such a state of absorption is attainable, and Vogl’s saying of Schubert, that he composed in a state of clairvoyance, may be applied to all creative musiclans, |

These are, in brief, the fundamental principles. which Schopenhauer, first among philosophers, has. laid down for the metaphysical essence of our art, and which Wagner has adopted, without any modifications of importance, in his lately published pamphlet on Beethoven.

It ought, however, to be added that’ in the final conclusions with regard to the concrete appearances of musical genius, which both the artist and philosopher have founded on this common basis, they differ widely. Schopenhauer seems to have considered music as an art of entirely independent and self-sufficient means of expression, the free:

mee y ¥ 44) - is > - a Te 7 ta] J * vars re * - ar a movement of which could only suffer from a too close alliance with worded poetry. He even goes to the length of highly commending Rossini’s way of proceeding, in which the words of the text are treated quite en bagatelle, and in which, therefore, ‘music speaks its own language so purely and distinctly that it does not require the words at all, and has its full effect even if performed by instruments only.” Such a sentence cannot but surprise us from the same lips, which have uttered the profound thoughts referred to on the foregoing pages. But the philosopher has that in common with the poet, that his abstract contemplations arise from an intuitive consciousness, which is all but independent of, and not always applicable to, the results of actual knowledge. ,

The philosophical side of the question being thus stated, we have now to follow Wagner on his own grounds, in order to witness the bearing of this speculation on the historical progress of our art. The theoretical works of Wagner, to the contents of which I wish to introduce the reader in the next following pages, are considerable in number and variety of subject-matter. In glancing through the complete edition of his writings, lately published in nine volumes, one is struck with admiration at the range of an intellectual power which, greatly exceeding the limits of one art, lays a firm hold on almost all the moving currents of contemporary thought, overpowering their heterogeneous motions, and leading them with an unequalled force of concentration to the one aim of its own aspiration. Politics, religion, history, and national economy are treated with the same sovereign power of centripetal rotation, in so far as they may tend to the desired ideal of a new phase of art, and of national and individual life regenerated through means of it. For the artist is to be the longed-for Messiah, to deliver future generations from the fetters of custom and prejudice, and I need not add that this artist is to speak to the nations from the hallowed boards of a truly popular stage, and that his words shall be accompanied by the inspiring strains of the divinest of arts, music. ‘* Rebus humanis inest quidam circulus,” we may exclaim with the great Roman historian, when, in this boldest dream of our latter days, we perceive a close affinity to the Greek drama and its vital reciprocity with the life of the nation; an affinity which, as we shall see hereafter, even extends to

See the internal economy of this’ drama and its two most important compounds.

It would, of course, lead us too far to follow

‘Wagner’s thought into all its collateral ramifications. The present writer will think himself happy if he should succeed) “in condensing into an organic whole the abundance of speculative material, as far as it relates more immediately to the subject in point,’ @e., the relative positions of music and poetry in their united

-efforts.

From the entirely supern atural character of music’ as established by Schopenhauer, Wagner proceeds to conclude its comparative independence of the conditions under which the visible world acts upon our senses; that is, of space and time.

In an art of sound, space is altogether out of the question; but even time can in a certain sense be dispensed with in what is most musical in music—harmony. A harmonic chord, as sueh, is absolutely unmeasurable by time; and in pieces, like the divine works of Palestrina, where the gradual progress from one harmonious combination to another is scarcely perceptible, the consciousness of change, and with it that of passing time itself, almost ceases, and we seem to have entered, under the master’s guidance, the quiet realms of divine non-existence. ‘ But music could not always remain in this state of passive calm, and as soon as its other most important element, rhythm, is introduced, everything changes suddenly, and we are at once transported into the restless waves of time and progress. For, as we know from Aristoxenos, rhythm is nothing but a regular return of shorter and longer portions of time, as manifested by a movement performed in this time, the olject of the movement in music being the succession of melodious intervals—.e., the pédros, or tune. / Melody, therefore, is the daughter of the quiet repose in harmony and the throbbing motion of rhythm, and both elements are equally necessary for its beautiful growth. Still, rhythm beimg an intruder in the realm of pure music, the compositions which, like dances, are exclusively founded on it-must be -of a lower order than where the melody, grows out of harmonious relations. With these three elements, viz, harmony, rhythm, and melody, we dave exhausted the means of expression which music proper can call its own. Also about its aims and objects there can be no doubt, after the foregoing remarks. Music’s own domain is the reign of unimpaired impulse,—the tenderest vibrations of will and passion,—as the immediate effluence of which we have to consider it. But its origin, as well as the character of its instruments, excludes it from the sphere of actual realities, and prevents it from rivalling articulate speech in the distinct rendering of emotions.

The purest and most adequate organ of our art in its independent state, is instrumental music, the separate existence of which is of comparatively recent date, beginning with Bach, and ending (if we may believe Wagner) with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. In this, even the supreme genius of Beethoven confesses its inability of expressing its highest aspiration in music alone; it calls poetry to its assistance, and the words of Schiller’s ‘ Freude,’ added to Beethoven’s enchanted strains, sound, as it were, the deathknell of music in its separate condition, and the rise of a new epoch, in which music and poetry can be severed no more. With this view we are able to agree only in a modified way,

| s RICHARD WAGNER. 17 but will not at present interrupt the progress of Wagner’s ideas by untimely deviation. The combination of music and poetry, Wagner proceeds, to which Beethoven repaired when the insufficiency of his musical means became obvious, ~ was of course not invented or used for the first time by him. It, on the contrary, preceded the artificial separation of the two arts. The traditions of all nations speak of the poet and singer as the same person, and the mere fact of the human voice being at the’ same time one of the most perfect musical instruments, seems to indicate the organic necessity of such a combination, as divined in the lines of the ‘ Passionate Pilgrim ’—

“Tf music and sweet poetry agree

As they must needs, the sister and the brother. % % % One God is God of both as poets feign.”

Besides, the metrical element which exists in an embryonic and all but latent state in the spoken language, can be interpreted and displayed in all its charms only by the aid of real melody, which, as it were, must grow out of the rhythmical structure of verse and stanza. In their ideal aims the two sister arts form also a necessary complement

C.

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_ to each other. The free expression of intense and abundant feeling in poetry is but too often encumbered by the speculative structure of language, while, on the other hand, the soaring flight of music, lacks a starting-point of strictly defined and recognisable pathos. Music and poetry, therefore, by both their powers and weaknesses are referred to each other’s aid; and the results of their combination will be of a higher order than is attainable by either of them in their separate state. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that their close union will be made possible only by a mutual compromise, in which either of them has to resign certain peculiarities of its own in fayour of the common aim. |

The way in which such a compromise has been attempted has varied considerably in different times and nations. In the lyrical parts of the Greek tragedy (for it is to the drama, as the highest result of both music and poetry, that we have now to turn our chief attention), music, as we know, took a prominent part; so prominent, indeed, that the metrical structure of the choric pieces can be understood only from its connection with song. This importance appears in

Aa on Oe pig Ae te ge OR a eran a still stronger light, if with Professor Nietzsche,* we consider music in the antique drama as the representative of the Bacchic element which forms the wild ecstatic undercurrent of the measured Apollonian self-consciousness of the spoken dialogue, and in this way becomes the symbol of that most mysterious phase of Greek and, in a wider sense, of human nature. Still the essentially rhythmical nature of Greek composition could not be favourable to the flow of melody, which, as we have seen, depends for its more elevated effects chiefly on harmonious beauty. Unfortunately the sense for harmony seems to have been little in accordance with the other accomplishments of the most artistic nation of the world. ven if we follow the most favourable accounts, the knowledge of polyphony was all but wanting among the Greeks, and the imperfect nature of their scales, without the major seventh, betrays, at least according to our notions, a deplorable want of musical ear. Under these circumstances it scarcely required the powers of Aischylus or Sophocles to

* In his interesting work, Die Geburt der Tragddie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of the Tragedy from the Spirit of Music). Leipsic: Fritzsch.

° ge.

settle the question of preponderance in the Greek tragedy in favour of poetry, which had all the advantages of technical perfection in the hands of men of unmatchable genius. It remains to acknowledge the keen perception of the relations of the two arts shown by the Greeks in this treatment, in which music, imperfect though it might be, was applied to its true purpose of intensifying the rhythmical power and ideal pathos of words. This state of things was entirely changed in the next important phase of dramatic music which we encounter in Italy, about the beginning of the seventeenth century. Like the renaissance of the fine arts, the Italian opera was, or pretended to be, a revival of antique traditions. But the affinity between the two epochs in regard to this was of a very superficial character. Music this time entered the lists under much more favourable auspices. First of all, the language it had to deal with had lost its rhythmical character entirely ; in poetry a mere counting of syllables had taken the place of metrical accentuation, and music was at full liberty to supply the want of arsis and thesis according to its own conditions. The character of modern feeling was likewise more akin to the intense, but vague and indistinct nature of musical expression. In its way through the middle ages, with their romantic conception of love, and the mysterious terrors and charms of Christian revelation, mankind had lost that firm grasp of realities which always formed the substratum of the loftiest flights of Greek genius. There were certain vibrations of feeling in this longing for the supernatural which would not allow of the limits of words, and absolutely required the more congenial raiment of pure sound. At the epoch we speak of the great poets _of Italy had passed away, and the void which had been left even by their mighty deeds now remained. to be filled up by the musician, whose means were by this time more equal to his great task. For his art had now passed out of the stage of childish stammering. The homophonous innocence of the Doric and Mixolydiec scales had left only a dim tradition. Polyhymnia had undergone the uncouth attempts at discipline which we are used to attribute to Hucbald. She had learnt from Guittone - di Arezzo to fix her thoughts in indelible signs, and two centuries’ training in the school of the Netherlands had taught her the powers of polyphonous figuration. When this school reached its climax in the great Orlando di Lasso, and in Goudimel’s pupil, the divine Roman, Palestrina, music had not to shun comparison with any of the sister arts.

The superior position which it was thus enabled to take could not be favourable to its harmonious co-operation with poetry in the result of their combined efforts—the opera. It is true that at the beginning the rights of music were asserted in a very modest way. In the first lyrical drama, ‘ Daphnis,’ which was performed at Florence, in 1594, the musical part seems to have consisted chiefly in the transformation of the spoken dialogue into recitative, both of the ‘“secco” and ‘ obligato” kinds, accompanied by the orchestra, such as it was at the time. But Monteverde soon afterwards became bolder in his musical conceptions. Both the orchestral and vocal parts were increased by the introduction of so-called symphonies (7.e., preludes and interludes), and ensemble pieces for the singers. Alessandro Scarlatti first used the regular form of the aria in the opera, which henceforth became entirely dependent on musical purposes. Certain established forms of absolute music, like finale or duet, were hodily transferred into the action of the piece, without any regard to their poetical propriety. ~In the course of time the poet became the bondsman of the musician, and had to arrange his libretti (as they were ignominiously called) entirely according to the arbitrary decision of the latter. Even the human voice, the last stronghold of the poetical element in music, was treated henceforth like any other instrument, only with a view to display its beauties of sound. In most cases 1t seems as if words were put into the mouth of the singer only as more convenient for him to pronounce than meaningless vowels. At most their contents served to give the composer some slight indication whether to write a_ brilliant allegro or a languid adagio. Nearly the same might be said of the whole dramatic poem, the merits of which depended almost entirely on its adaptedness for musical purposes. The dulness and absurdity of most of these productions are, im consequence, almost inconceivable. Soon, however, music in its own sphere had to experience the evil results of this neglect of its natural foun- \/ dation. Forgetful of its higher artistic aims, it | lost hold of all poetic meaning, and was degraded to a mere display of skill on the part* of clever vocalists, who performed the most daring salt mortali on the tight-rope of fiortture. If formerly the composer had encroached upon the domain of the poet, he now on his part was made the slave of the castrato, who, with great real merit as a vocal virtuoso, combined an innocence of all artistic intentions scarcely to be ene even by the stars of the modern operatic stage. /