I
INTRODUCTION
ROMANTICISM IN MUSIC
I
Historians of music are accustomed to speak of the first half or three-quarters of the nineteenth century as the Romantic Period in music, and of those composers who immediately follow Beethoven, including Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Chopin, Liszt, and some others, as the Romantic Composers. The word "romantic," as thus used, forms no doubt a convenient label; but if we attempt to explain its meaning, we find ourselves involved in several difficulties. Were there then no romanticists before Schubert? Have no composers written romantically since 1870? Such questions, arising at once, lead us inevitably to the more general inquiry, What is romanticism?
In the broadest sense in which the word "romanticism" can be used, the sense in which it is taken, for example, by Pater in the Postscript of his "Appreciations," it seems to mean simply interest in novel and strange elements of artistic effect. "It is the addition of strangeness to beauty," says Pater, "that constitutes the romantic character in art; and the desire of beauty being a fixed element in every artistic organization, it is the addition of curiosity to this desire of beauty that constitutes the romantic temper." Romanticism is thus the innovating spirit, as opposed to the conserving spirit of classicism; romanticists appear in every age and school; and Stendhal is right in saying that "all good art was romantic in its day." It is interesting, in passing, to note the relation of this definition to the widely prevalent notion that romanticism is extravagant and lawless. To the mind wedded to tradition all novelty is extravagant; and since an artistic form is grasped only after considerable practice, all new forms necessarily appear formless at first. Hence, if we begin by saying that romantic art is novel and strange art, it requires only a little inertia or intolerance in our point of view to make us add that it is grotesque and irrational art, or in fact not art at all. Critics have often been known to arrive at this conclusion.
Suggestive as Pater's definition is, however, it is obviously too vague and sweeping to carry us far in our quest. It does not explain why Monteverde, with his revolutionary dominant seventh chords, or the Florentine composers of the early seventeenth century, with their unheard-of free recitative, were not quite as genuine romanticists as Schubert with his whimsical modulation and Schumann with his harsh dissonances. We have still to ask why, instead of appending our label of "romantic" to the innovators of centuries earlier than the nineteenth, we confine it to that comparatively small group of men who immediately followed Beethoven.
The answer is to be found in the distinctness of the break that occurred in musical development at this time, the striking difference in type between the compositions of Beethoven and those of his successors. From Philipp Emanuel Bach up to Beethoven, the romanticism of each individual composer merely carried him a step forward on a well-established path; it prompted him to refine here, to pare away there, to expand this feature, to suppress that, in a scheme of art constantly maturing, but retaining always its essential character. With Beethoven, however, this particular scheme of art, of which the type is the sonata, with its high measure of formal beauty and its generalized expression, reached a degree of perfection beyond which it could not for the moment go. The romantic impulse toward novelty of Beethoven's successors had to satisfy itself, therefore, in some other way than by heightening abstract Æsthetic beauty or general expressiveness; until new technical resources could be developed the limit was reached in those directions. Beethoven had himself, meanwhile, opened the door on an inviting vista of possibilities in a new field—that of highly specialized, idiosyncratic, subjective expression. He had shown how music, with Mozart so serene, detached, and impersonal, could become a language of personal feeling, of individual passion, even of whim, fantasy, and humor. It was inevitable that those who came after him should seek their novelty, should satisfy their curiosity, along this new path of subjectivism and specialized expression. And as this music of the person, as we may call it, which now began to be written, was different not only in degree but in kind from the objective art which prepared the way for it, it is natural that in looking back upon so striking a new departure we should give it a special name, such as romanticism.
As for the other line of demarcation, which separates the romantic period from what we call the modern, that is purely arbitrary. "Modern" is a convenient name for us to give to those tendencies from which we have not yet got far enough away to view them in large masses and to describe them disinterestedly. As the blur of too close a vision extends back for us to 1870 or thereabout, we find it wise to let our romantic period, about which we can theorize and form hypotheses, end there for the present. But it already seems clear enough that the prevalent tendency even in contemporary music is still the personal and subjective one that distinguished the early romantic period. Probably our grandchildren will extend that period from Beethoven's later works to those of some composer yet unborn. And thus we have, in studying the romantic composers, the added interest that we are in a very real sense studying ourselves.
II
If, with a view to getting a more precise notion of the new tendencies, we ask ourselves now what are the salient differences between a classical and a romantic or modern piece of music, we shall be likely to notice at once certain traits of the latter, striking enough, which are nevertheless incidental rather than essential to romanticism, and must be discounted before we can come at its inmost nature. These changes have come chiefly as a result of the general evolution of musical resources, and though necessarily modifying the romantic methods, are not primary causes or effects of them. Thus, for example, the nineteenth century has seen an extraordinary development in the mechanism of all musical instruments, and in the skilful use of them by musicians. This is impressed upon us by the most cursory glance at any modern orchestral score. Haydn's and Mozart's orchestra consisted of a nucleus of strings, with a few pairs of wood and brass wind instruments added casually for solos or to reinforce certain voices in the harmonic tissue. The scheme was fundamentally monochromatic, however much it might be set off by bits of color here and there. By the time of Wagner the orchestra was essentially a group of several orchestras of divers colors: the addition of a third flute, of English horn to the oboe family, of bass clarinet, and of contrafagotto made each group of the wood-wind instruments capable of fairly complete harmony; the horns were increased in number from two to six or eight, the bass trumpet made possible complete chords for the trumpets, and there were four trombones and a choir of tubas. Thus, instead of having a uniform foundation, with variety merely in the trimming, the modern orchestra has complete, independent choirs of most various instruments, capable of all sorts of combination, opposition, and contrast.
The manner of writing for the orchestra changed as much as its constitution. Beethoven usually writes three- or four-part harmony for the strings, and doubles the wood and brass as seems effective. TschaÏkowsky and Wagner are apt to put an entire family of instruments on one melodic voice, another on another, a third on a third—as in the second movement of the "Symphonie PathÉtique," at the point where flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons sing the melody, while first and second violins and violas pick an obligato to it. In a word, much more attention is paid in the modern orchestra to richness and variety of tone-color and to an impressionistically effective disposition of the various timbres than in the classical scores.
The same tendency is observable in chamber and pianoforte music. Not only are modern composers fond of curious groupings of wind and string instruments, as in the trumpet septet of Saint-SaËns, the clarinet quintet and horn trio of Brahms, and other such works, but when they use only the four stringed instruments they combine contrasting rhythms and modes of phrasing, as well as pizzicato, the sordino, the high register of the 'cello, and other exotic devices, with an unfailing sense of color-values. Schubert is the first conspicuous example of this sort of quartet writing; DvorÁk is his worthy follower. As for the piano, there is almost as much difference between the piano writing of Beethoven, so often thick, harsh, and lumpish, and the ramifying figuration of Schumann or the wide, clear arpeggiated accompaniments and flowering scale-figures of Chopin as there is between the coloring of Rembrandt and that of Monet.
All this gain in sensuous richness and technical elaboration is, however, to be considered largely as a concomitant rather than a direct result (though to some extent is was that) of the romantic movement. It was primarily merely a phase of that unparalleled material and mechanical progress so characteristic of the nineteenth century. The modern orchestra and the modern pianoforte are simply special examples of the ingenuity of that century in mechanical devices; the genius which turned the clavichord into the piano was the same as that which substituted the propeller for sails, and the electric telegraph for the lumbering mail-coach. But if this modern mechanical genius has indeed brought to the musician priceless gifts, it is still important to remember that perfected mechanisms do not account for romantic music, which might conceivably have existed without them. Instruments alone cannot make music, any more than a steam derrick can build a bridge. If we wish to seize the true spirit of the modern musical art, we must, after all, leave orchestra, and piano, and sensuous value behind, and ascertain to what use composers have turned all these resources, and to what manner of expression, embodied in what kind of forms, they have been spurred by the romantic spirit.
III
Difficult to make, and dangerous when made, as are sweeping generalizations about so many-sided a matter as the expressive character of whole schools or eras of art, there seem to be generic differences between classical and romantic expression which we can hardly avoid remarking, and of which it is worth while to attempt a tentative definition, especially if we premise that it is to be suggestive rather than absolute. The constant generality of classical expression, and the objectivity of attitude which it indicates in the worker, cannot but strike the modern student, especially if he contrasts them with the exactly opposite features of contemporary art. The classical masters aim, not at particularity and minuteness of expression, but at the congruous setting forth of certain broad types of feeling. They are jealous of proportion, vigilant to maintain the balance of the whole work, rigorous in the exclusion of any single feature that might through undue prominence distort or mar its outlines. Their attitude toward their work is detached, impersonal, disinterested—a purely craftsmanlike attitude, at the furthest pole from the passionate subjectivity of our modern "tone-poets." J. S. Bach, for example, the sovereign spirit of this school, is always concerned primarily with the plastic problem of weaving his wonderful tonal patterns; we feel that what these patterns turn out to express, even though it be of great, and indeed often of supreme, poignancy, is in his mind quite a secondary matter. The preludes and fugues of the "Well-tempered Clavichord" are monuments of abstract beauty, rather than messages, pleas, or illustrations. And even when their emotional burden is so weighty as in the B-flat minor prelude or the B-minor fugue of the first book, it still remains general and, as it were, communal. Bach is not relieving his private mind; he is acting as a public spokesman, as a trustee of the emotion of a race or nation. This gives his utterance a scope, a dignity, a nobility, that cannot be accounted for by his merely personal character.
Haydn and Mozart illustrate the same attitude in a different department of music. Their symphonies and quartets are almost as impersonal as his preludes and fugues. The substance of all Haydn's best work is the folk-music of the Croatians, a branch of the Slavic race; its gaiety, elasticity, and ingenuousness are Slavic rather than merely Haydnish. It is true that he idealizes the music of his people, as a gifted individual will always idealize any popular art he touches; but he remains true to his source, and accurately representative of it, just as the finest tree contains only those elements which it can draw from the soil in which it grows. Mozart, more personal than Haydn, shares with him the aloofness, the reticence, of classicism. What could be more Greek, more celestially remote, than the G-minor Symphony, or the quintet in the same key? What could be less a detailed biography of a hero, more an ideal sublimation of his essential character, than the "Jupiter Symphony"? And even in such a deeply emotional conception as the introduction to the C-major quartet, can we label any specific emotion? Can we point to the measures and say, "Here is grief; here is disappointment; here is unrequited love"?
In Beethoven we become conscious of a gradually changing ideal of expression. There are still themes, movements, entire works, in which the dominant impulse is the architectonic zeal of classicism; and there is the evidence of the sketchbooks that this passionate individualist could subject himself to endless discipline in the quest of pure plastic beauty. But there are other things, such as the third, fifth, and ninth symphonies, the "Egmont" and "Coriolanus" overtures, the slow movement of the G-major concerto (that profoundly pathetic dialogue between destiny and the human heart), and the later quartets, in which a novel particularity and subjectivity of utterance make themselves felt. In such works the self-forgetful artist, having his vicarious life only in the serene beauty of his creations, disappears, and Ludwig van Beethoven, bursting with a thousand emotions that must out, steps into his place and commands our attention, nobly egotistic, magnificently individual. And then there is the "Pastoral Symphony," in which he turns landscape painter, and with minutest details of bird-notes and shepherds' songs and peasants' dances delineates the external objects, as well as celebrates the inner spirit, of the countryside. These things mark the birth of romanticism.
For romanticism is, in essence, just this modern subjectivity and individualism, just this shifting of the emphasis from abstract beauty, with its undifferentiated expressiveness, to personal communication, minute interest in the uttermost detail, impassioned insistence on each emotion for itself rather than as a subordinate member in an articulate organism, and, in extreme cases, to concrete objects, persons, and scenes in the extra-musical world. Musicians since Beethoven have inclined to exploit more and more that aspect of their art which is analogous to language, even when this means neglect of the other aspect, the nearest analogue of which is to be found in sculpture, architecture, and decorative painting. The modern watchword has come to be initiative rather than obedience, originality rather than skill, individuality rather than truth to universal human nature. It is, after all, one impulse, the impulse toward specialization, that runs through all the various manifestations of the romantic spirit, and may be traced alike in the lyricism of Schubert, the fanciful whimsicality of Schumann, the picturesqueness of Mendelssohn, the introspection of Chopin, and the realism of Berlioz and Liszt.
In Schubert, the first of the out-and-out romanticists, and the eldest of them all in point of time (his birth date falls in the eighteenth century), we find a curious grafting of a new spirit on an old stem. Brought up on the quartets and symphonies of Haydn and Mozart, making his first studies in boyishly literal imitation of them, he acquired the letter of the classical idiom as none of the others save Mendelssohn ever did. His works in sonata form, written up to 1816, might well have emanated from Esterhaz or Salzburg; the C-major Symphony, so far as general plan is concerned, would have done no discredit to Beethoven. Yet the spirit of Schubert is always lyrical. It was fated from his birth that he should write songs, for his was a typically sentimental temperament; and when he planned a symphony, he instinctively conceived it as a series of songs for instruments, somewhat more developed than those intended for a voice, but hardly different in kind. As a naturalist can reconstruct in fancy an extinct animal from a fossil jaw-bone, a musical historian might piece out a fair conception of what romanticism is, in the dearth of other evidence, from a study of "ErlkÖnig," or "StÄndchen," or "Am Meer"; and the ideas he might thus form would be extended rather than altered by acquaintance with the "Unfinished Symphony" or the D-minor Quartet. The lyrical Schubert contrasts always with the heroic and impersonal Bach or Beethoven, much as Tennyson contrasts with Shakespeare, or Theocritus with Sophocles.
Schumann adds to the lyrical ardor of Schubert insatiable youthful enthusiasm, whimsicality, a richly poetic fancy, and a touch of mysticism. His songs are even more personal than Schubert's, and his piano pieces, especially the early ones, bristle with eccentricities. The particularity, minute detail, and personal connotation of the "Abegg Variations," the "DavidsbÜndertÄnze," the "Papillons," the "Carnaval," the "Kreisleriana," are almost grotesque. He confides to us, through this music, his friendships, his flirtations, his courtship, his critical sympathies, his artistic creed, his literary devotions. Never was music so circumstantial, so autobiographic. In later years, when he had passed out of the enchanted circle of youthful egotism, and was striving for a more universal speech, his point of view became not essentially less personal but only less wayward. Till the last his art is vividly self-conscious—that is his charm and his limitation. No one has so touchingly voiced the aspirations of the imprisoned soul, no one has put meditation and introspection into tones, as he has done in the adagio of the C-major Symphony, the "Funeral March" of the Quintet, the F-sharp major Romance for piano.
If Schumann sounds, as no other can, the whole gamut of feeling of a sensitive modern soul, Mendelssohn, quite dissimilar in temperament,—correct, reserved, dispassionate,—is nevertheless also romantic by virtue of his picturesqueness, his keen sense for the pageantry of life, his delicate skill as an illustrator of nature and of imaginative literature. His "Songs without Words" reveal a strain of mild lyricism, but he is never intimate or reckless, he never wholly reveals himself. His discreet objectivity is far removed from the frankly subjective enthusiasms of Schubert and Schumann. He was, in fact, by tradition, training, and native taste, a classicist; the exhibition of deep feeling was distasteful to his fastidious reticence; and he is thus emotionally less characteristic of his period than any of his contemporaries. But for all that he shows unmistakably in the felicity of his tone-painting the modern interest in picturesque detail, in the concrete circumstance, the significant particular. Illustration rather than abstract beauty—that is one of the special interests of the new school. No one has cultivated it more happily than the composer of the "Midsummer Night's Dream" music, the "Hebrides Overture," and the "Scotch" and "Italian" Symphonies.
Chopin presents an even more singular instance than Schumann affords of what introspection can make of a composer, of how resolute self-communion can individualize his work until its intense personal savor keeps little to remind us of other music. All Chopin's tastes were so aristocratic that the exclusiveness of his style seems a matter of course, and was probably to his mind a supreme merit. And if it debarred him from some musical experiences, if it made his music sound better in a drawing-room than in a concert hall, it certainly gave it a marvellous delicacy, finesse, originality, and fragile beauty. It is, so to speak, valetudinarian music, and preserves its pure white complexion only by never venturing into the full sunlight. Here, then, is another differentiation in musical style, a fresh departure from the classic norm, due to the exacting taste of the mental aristocrat, the carefully self-bounded dreamer and sybarite.
Markedly specialized as the expression is, however, in Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Chopin, and strikingly contrasted as it is with the serene generality of the classical music, the two schools after all differ rather in the degree of emphasis they lay on the various elements of effect than in kind. Both, we feel, are using the same means, though to such different ends. But with Berlioz and Liszt we pass into a new world, in which not only emphasis and intention, but the actual materials and the fundamental principles of art, have undergone a change. These men have pushed the romantic concreteness even beyond the range of sentiments and emotions, to invade that of facts and events. They are no longer satisfied with the minutiÆ of feelings; they must depict for us the external appearance of the people who feel, give us not only heroes, but these heroes' coats, with the exact number of buttons and the proper cut, according to the fashion of the particular decade. If Schumann and his fellows are the sentimental novelists of music, the Thackerays and the George Eliots, here are the naturalists, the scientific analysts, the "realists" with microscope and scalpel in hand, the Zolas and the Gorkys.
This insistence on the letter is quite instinctive with Berlioz. In the first place, he was a Frenchman; and the French have a genius for the concrete, and in music have shown their bias by approaching it always from the dramatic, histrionic point of view. Opera is the norm of music to the Frenchman. For him, music originates in the opera-house, quite as inevitably as for the German it originates in the concert room. Berlioz's "symphonies," therefore, as a matter of course, took the form of operas, with the characters and action suppressed or relegated to the imagination.
In the second place, the active impulses in Berlioz's personal temperament predominated over the contemplative to a degree unusual even in his countrymen; he conceived a work of art in terms not of emotion but of action; and his musical thinking was a sort of narration in tones. He accordingly wrote, with ingenuous spontaneity, in a style that was, from the German standpoint, revolutionary, unprecedented, iconoclastic—a style the essence of which was its matter-of-fact realism. His "Symphonie Fantastique," which Mr. Hadow calls his most uncompromising piece of program music, sets forth the adventures of a hero (whose identity with the composer is obvious) in five movements or acts, and with the most sedulous particularity. We first see him struggling with love, tormented by jealousy, consoled by religion; then in a ball-room, pausing in the midst of the dance to muse on his beloved; then in the country, listening to idyllic shepherds and hearing the summer thunder. He dreams that he has murdered the beloved, that he is to be beheaded at the guillotine; he is surrounded by witches, his mistress has herself become a witch, the Dies IrÆ clangs its knell of death across the wild chaos of the dance....
Now in all this the striking point is the concreteness of the imagery, the plenitude of detail, the narrative and descriptive literalness of the treatment—and above all the subordination of the music to a merely symbolic function. Berlioz here brings into prominence for the first time the device, so frequent in later operatic and program music, of treating his themes or motives as symbols of his characters, associated with these by a purely arbitrary but nevertheless effective bond. When we hear the melody we are expected to think of the character, and all the changes rung on it are prompted not by the desire for musical development, but by psychological considerations connected with the dramatic action. Thus, for example, in this symphony the motive known as "l'idÉe fixe" represents the beloved; its fragmentary appearances in the second, third, and fourth movements tell us that the thought of her is passing through our hero's mind; and in the last movement, when she endues the horrid form of a witch, we hear a distorted, grotesque version of it sardonically whistled by the piccolo. Highly characteristic of Berlioz is this use of melodies, so dearly valued in classic music for themselves alone, as mere counters for telling off the incidents in the plot, or cues for the entrances of the dramatis personÆ.
Liszt, a man of keener musical perception than Berlioz, placed himself also, in obedience to his strong dramatic sense, on the same artistic platform. In such a work as the "Faust Symphony" we discern a more musical nature producing practically the same kind of music. There is the same narrative and descriptive intention; the three movements take their names from the chief characters in the action, Faust, Gretchen, and Mephistopheles; and though the second is more general in expression than Berlioz ever is, the other two are good examples of his method. There is also the same machinery of leading motives and their manipulation according to the requirements of symbolism, even to the parodying of the Faust themes in the "Mephistopheles" section. In the symphonic poem, "Les PrÉludes," however (and in the "Dante Symphony" and other compositions), Liszt shows his German blood in a treatment more imaginative, the actuating subjects being often not persons and events, but emotional and mental states. But the fact that many of the transformations of the themes are from the musical standpoint travesties, justified only by their psychological intention, shows that the attitude even here is still that of the dramatist, not that of the abstract musician. The art, in a word, is still representative, not presentative and self-sufficing. Again, the representative function of music for Liszt is shown by his tendency to approach composition indirectly, and through extraneous interests of his many-sided mind, instead of with the classic single-mindedness: his pieces are suggested by natural scenery, historical characters, philosophic abstractions, poems, novels, and even statues and pictures.
In all these ways and degrees we see exemplified the inclination of the nineteenth-century composers to seek a more and more definite, particular, and concrete type of expression. Subjective shades and nuances take the place of the ground-colors of classicism; music comes to have so personal a flavor that it is as impossible to confound a piece of Chopin with one of Schumann as it is difficult, by internal evidence alone, to say whether Mozart or Haydn is the author of an unfamiliar symphony; ultimately, insistence upon special emotions opens the way to absorption in what is even more special—individual characters, events, and situations,—and on the heels of the lyrical treads the realistic. The artistic stream thus reverses the habit of natural streams: as it gets farther and farther from its source it subdivides and subdivides itself again, until it is no longer a single large body, but a multitude of isolated brooks and rivulets. Our contemporary music, unlike the classical, is not the expression of a single social consciousness, but rather a heterogeneous aggregate of the utterances of many individuals. What is most captivating about it is the sensitive fidelity with which it reflects its composers' idiosyncrasies.
IV
All things human, however, have their price, and romanticism is no exception to the rule. The composers of the romantic period, in becoming more particular, grew in the same proportion less universal; in bowing to the inexorable evolutionary force that makes each modern man a specialist, they inevitably sacrificed something of the breadth, the catholicity, the magnanimity, of the old time. It is doubtless a sense of some such loss as this, dogging like a shadow all our gains, that takes us back periodically to a new appreciation of the classics. There is often a feeling of relief, of freer breathing and ampler leisure, as when we leave the confusion of the city for the large peace of the country, in turning from the modern complexities to the old simplicities, and forgetting that there is any music but Bach's. The reasons for this contrast between the two schools must of course lie deeply hidden in the psychology of Æsthetics, but a clew to them at least may be found near at hand, in the conditions of life, the everyday environments, of the two groups of artists.
It has often been remarked that the composers of the nineteenth century have been men of more cultivation, of greater intellectual elasticity and resulting breadth of interest, than their predecessors. Palestrina, Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, even Beethoven, concentrating their whole minds on music, were far less curious as to other human pursuits than their later brethren. The six composers we are studying are impressive instances of this modern many-sidedness of mind. At least three of them, Schumann, Berlioz, and Liszt, were skilled journalists and men of letters; Schumann with the finely judicial, fancifully conceived sketches of his New Journal of Music, Berlioz with his brilliant, fantastically humorous feuilletons, and Liszt with his propaganda, in book and pamphlet, of Wagner, Chopin, and other contemporaries. (Fancy Bach interrupting his steady stream of cantatas to write an exposition of the genius of Handel!) Schumann was, moreover, something of a poet, and Mendelssohn was one of the most voluminous and picturesque of letter-writers. Chopin was as versed in social as in musical graces and Liszt was—what was he not?—a courtier, a Lovelace, a man of the world, and an abbÉ. Schubert alone, of them all the eldest and the nearest to classical traditions, was a composer pure and simple.
The versatility of these men was no accident or freak of coincidence; it was the effective trait that made their work so profusely allusive, so vividly minute, in short, so romantic. And what is more to our purpose just here, it was the underlying cause of a defect which is quite as symptomatic of romanticism as its merits. So various a mental activity must needs lack something in depth; if attention is spread wide it must be spread thin; thought given to avocations must be borrowed from the vocation. We should expect to find, accordingly, division of energy resulting, here as elsewhere, in a lack of concentration, a failure of power; and herein we are not disappointed. With the possible exception of Mendelssohn, no one of our six composers can compare, simply as a handicraftsman, with Bach or Mozart. Schubert was so little a contrapuntist that he had just engaged lessons when death interrupted his brief career. Schumann and Chopin gave in their youth innumerable hours that should have counted for systematic to routine the fanciful improvisation so seductive to poetic temperaments. Berlioz kicked down all the fences in his coltish days, and ever after looked askance at the artistic harness. Liszt, for all his diabolical cleverness, remained the slave of mannerisms, and became a dupe of his own rhetorical style.
Now there is doubtless in all this waywardness something that strikes in us a chord such as vibrates in sympathy with the small boy who, regardless of barbed wire, invades the orchard and carries off the delectable green apples. It is a fine thing to be young, it is glorious to be free. But sober second thought relentlessly follows: we know that apples must be sent to market in due course, and that that exciting green fruit is, after all, indigestible and unripe; and we know equally that musicians must undergo their apprenticeship, and that all art executed without adequate technical mastery is crude. The crudity of the art of our musical orchard-robbers becomes at once evident when we compare a single melody, or an entire movement, of Schubert or his successors with one by Mozart or Beethoven.
The single melody is the molecule of music, the smallest element in it that cannot be subdivided without loss of character. Every great melody has an indefinable distinction, a sort of personal flavor or individuality, which we may discern but cannot analyze. It has also, however, an organic quality, depending upon both the unity and the variety of its phraseology, that we can to a certain extent study and define. Assuming, to start with, the subtle distinction without which it would sink into the commonplace, we can compare and contrast it with other melodies in respect of its organic quality, its simultaneous presentation of unity and variety—in a word, its plastic beauty. Such a melody as the second theme of the first movement of Mozart's G-minor Quintet, for example, gains a wonderful charm from the complexity, and at the same time the final simplicity, of its phrase structure. The several musical figures, or motives, of which it is composed follow each other without the least impression of crass mechanical dovetailing; yet one feels, as they proceed, such a sense of logical progression, of orderly sequence, that the final cadence seems like an audible "Q. E. D." Contrasted with such dexterous phrase-weaving as this, many of Schubert's and Schumann's tunes, with their literal repetitions of short phrases, their set thesis and antithesis, seem pitifully bald and trite. It is hardly fair to take extreme cases, but they best bring out the point. Schubert's "Drang in die Ferne," ten consecutive measures of which repeat literally the same rhythm, and the theme in Schumann's "Abegg Variations," in which a single phrase recurs sixteen times, will make it almost painfully evident. This tendency to rhythmic monotony, to an unvaried singsong reiteration of phrase, besets constantly these two composers, too often takes Chopin in its grasp, and in Mendelssohn is aggravated by an inclination to stay in one key, page after page, until our heads droop with drowsiness. Berlioz, on the other hand, errs in the opposite direction. Variety, with him, degenerates into a chaotic miscellaneousness, and what should be an agreeably diversified landscape becomes a pathless jungle. In both cases there is a failure of the constructive faculty, due to a lack of mental coÖrdination and concentration. The price paid for interesting detail is monotony or instability in the organism.
Similar weaknesses reveal themselves when we pass from considering the elemental melodies to survey the ways in which they are built up into larger sections and whole movements—when we pass, that is, from form to structure.[1] None of the romantic composers attained a breadth, diversity, and solidity of construction in any wise comparable to Beethoven's. Schubert was intellectually too indolent, if not indifferent, to attempt intricate syntheses of his materials, but relied instead on their primitive charm to justify endless repetitions. Schumann, less tolerant of platitude, and gifted with more intense, if hardly more disciplined, imagination, resorted to constant kaleidoscopic change, resulting in those "mosaic forms" which are related to true cyclic forms much as a panorama is related to a picture. Mendelssohn was naturally a better master of construction, but the knots he ties are somewhat loose and inclined to ravel out. Chopin, a born miniaturist, obviously fails to make his sonatas and concertos anything but chance bundles of lyrical pieces. As for Berlioz and Liszt, they frankly faced their dilemma, and had the shrewdness to disclaim the desire to do that for which they wanted the faculty. They fell back on the "poetic forms," and let their works pile up without internal coherence, held together only by the thread of the story they were illustrating.
For this failure to work out the highest degree of plastic beauty possible to them, the romanticists frequently have to pay in a serious loss of power. Keenly interesting as are the details of their work, the whole impression is apt to lack fusion, clearness, integrity. Not without terrible risks may the musician neglect form, since form is itself, for him, perhaps more than for any of his brother artists in other mediums, a fundamental means of expression. Of this matter popular thought is inclined to take a superficial view; it is fond of confusing vital form with dry formalism, of speaking contemptuously of formal analysis as the pedantic dissection of lovely melodies, the plucking and counting of the petals of the flowers of art, and of reiterating ad nauseam its irritating half-truth, "Music is the language of the emotions." Popular thought would do well to pause and consider; to ask itself whether language too has not its form, without which it is unintelligible; to inquire how much of the expressive power of a lovely melody would remain were its pitch and time relations (that is, its form) materially altered, how long we could be inspired by the most exciting rhythms, were they ceaselessly reiterated without relief, and how eloquent we should find even the most moving symphony, were it written all in one key, or in several keys that had no relation to one another. Such consideration soon suggests the truth, which impresses us the more the more deeply we study music, that there is a general expressiveness underlying all particular expressions, a fundamental beauty by which all special beauties are nourished as flowers are nourished by the soil, a symmetry and orderly organization that can no more be dispensed with in music without crippling its eloquence than a normal regularity of the features can be dispensed with in the human face without distorting it into absurdity or debasing it into ugliness. Without its pervasive presence, all special features, however amusing or superficially appealing, fail to inspire or charm. They become as wild flowers plucked to languish indoors, as seaweeds taken from their natural setting of liquid coolness. Or again, the particular expressions of music may be compared to the strings of an instrument, of which the sounding board is plastic beauty; without its sympathetic reinforcement the strings, strike them as we may, give forth a scarcely audible murmur; with it, there is clear and powerful sonority. So the most ingenious music is dull and dead if it lack the vitality of organic form, but if it be beautiful it will make its way directly to the heart.
It is surely not necessary to add that this discussion of the primal importance of form is not intended to impeach all romantic music as deficient in the appeal that beauty alone can make. This were indeed a reductio ad absurdum. Much of the music of Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Chopin is of the rarest beauty, and, by the same token, of the most moving eloquence. The intention of our analysis is rather to secure that aid to the appreciation of just such beauties which discrimination alone can give, and by means of comparison to sharpen the focus of our mental image of what romanticism achieves and of what it fails to achieve. At its best, we shall rejoice to find, it shares the serene loveliness, the impersonal grandeur, of classicism. At its less than best, it offers us a vivid intellectual interest, a keen pleasure in following its wide ramifications and its faithful illustrations of many phases of life. At its worst only does its exaggerated passion for detail mislead it into petty and prosaic literalism.
V
A slightly different angle of approach to this whole problem of musical expression is afforded by psychological analysis. Here, again, as we might expect, modern theory, the learned as well as the popular, is somewhat biassed by the prominence in modern practice of certain special features of effect. The psychologists dwell with a pardonable partiality of vision on the means of special expression; to complete their theories the reader has often to add for himself a consideration of the psychology of form. An article by M. Edmond Goblot, entitled "La Musique Descriptive,"[2] is interesting, like others of its kind, both for what it explains and for what it ignores.
M. Goblot classifies expressive music under three headings, to which he gives the names of "la musique emotive," "la musique descriptive," and "la musique imitative." His first rubric is somewhat vague, a sort of rag-bag into which he stuffs "toute musique qui provoque l’emotion sans aucun intermediaire conscient." The other two are not only more precise, but serve to call attention to devices which have become very prominent in romantic, and especially in modern realistic, music. "Imitative" music, by reproducing literally sounds heard in the extra-musical world of nature, suggests to the listener the objects and events associated with them. Examples are the bird-notes in Beethoven's "Pastoral Symphony," the thunder in Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique," the bleating of sheep in Strauss's "Don Quixote," the striking of the clock and the wailing of the baby in his "Symphonia Domestica." "Descriptive" music suggests actions and events by means of analogies, chiefly of movement and of utterance, between the music and the object, and is of course far commoner than the more literal and narrowly circumscribed imitation. Beethoven is descriptive when he represents the even flowing of the brook, in the "Pastoral Symphony," by rippling figures in eighth notes, or when in the bass recitatives of the Ninth Symphony he suggests the impassioned utterance of an imaginary protagonist; Mendelssohn describes in his "Hebrides Overture" the heaving of the ocean, and in his "Midsummer Night's Dream" the dancing of fairies; Saint-SaËns reproduces in "Le Rouet d'Omphale" the very whirr of the spinning-wheel, and Wagner in his fire-music the ceaseless lapping of flames.
Such devices as these certainly occupy a prominent place in modern music. Almost every composer of the later nineteenth century has taken his fling at this sort of sketching from nature. One cannot resist, nevertheless, the suspicion that M. Goblot attaches too great an importance to what is, after all, a casual and desultory element in most compositions, and that he inclines to lay on the narrow shoulders of imitation and description a greater burden of explanation than they can carry. Beethoven's birds and brooks are attractive features in a great work; Saint-SaËns' spinning-wheel makes a charming arabesque on a harmony of solid musicianship; but what are we to say to M. Goblot's assertion that a passage cited from Alexandre George, modulating upward by whole steps, is emphatically expressive because it "reminds us of a person reiterating with growing exaltation the same authoritative or impassioned affirmation, and each time advancing a step, in an attitude of menace or defiance"? Can we accept as unquestioningly as he does a series of thirteen consecutive fifths, descriptive of sunrise, on the ground that it "wounds our ears as the light of the sun wounds our eyes"? And listen to his comment on Schubert's "Trout," that long-suffering denizen of Teutonic waters: "En courant sur son lit de pierres, elle se creuse de plis profonds, se hÉrisse de crÊtes saillantes, et ces plis et ces crÊtes se croisent obliquement en miroitant." Schubert's fat shoulders, we suspect, would have shaken could he have read this ingenious commentary on his work.
If such finical transcription of natural sights and sounds is the aim of music, why do we prefer Beethoven's thunder, which clings cravenly to the diatonic scale, to Berlioz's, so much more realistic in its daring dissonance? Why do we not forthwith turn about face on the road our art has so long been travelling, and forsake musical intervals, those quite artificial figments, for the noises which surround us everywhere in the actual world? Noise is indeed the hidden goal toward which all description and imitation aspire, and sound could never have passed into music under their guidance, but only in quest of a far deeper, more subtle expressiveness. It is hard to believe that any sane listener would long continue to patronize music in which there was not something more truly satisfying than the lapping of brooks, the crashing of storm or battle, and the whirring of spinning-wheels or the creaking of wind-mills. If such were the case, we should have to admit sadly that music had fallen to the level to which dramatic art falls in the real-tank-and-practicable-saw-mill melodrama, to which painting falls in those pictures from which we try to pluck the too tangible grape.
M. Goblot evidently realizes himself that there is a subtler appeal than that of description and imitation; for it is in order to account for it that he makes his separate heading of "la musique emotive," by which he indicates all music which acts directly upon the emotions, without the aid of any recognition of external objects, any intellectual concepts, or, as he says, "aucun intermediaire conscient." The appeal he here has in mind is that of thousands of melodies, which, without describing or imitating any concrete object, suggest vividly special states of feeling, by recalling to us, in veiled, modified, and idealized form, those gestures or cries we habitually make under the spur of such feelings. Since the spontaneous vocal expressions of strong emotion—wailing, crying, pleading, moaning, and the like—have all their characteristic cadences, which can be more or less accurately reproduced in a bit of melody, and since the natural bodily gesticulations can be similarly suggested by divers rhythmical movements, music has the power to induce a great variety of emotional states by what we may call direct contagion, without the intermediation of any mental images. It can act upon us like the infection of tears or laughter, to which we involuntarily succumb, without asking for any reasons. And it certainly exercises this power much more constantly and steadily than it imitates or describes. Almost all lyrical melodies, such as Schumann's "Ich Grolle Nicht," with its persistently rising inflection of earnest protestation, or Chopin's "Funeral March," with its monotone of heavy grief, will be found on analysis to reËcho, in an idealized and transfigured form, the natural utterance of passion. This kind of expression, which has been frequently described, appeals to our subconscious associations rather than to those conscious processes of thought by which we follow realistic delineation. Operating at a deeper level in our natures, it is proportionately more potent and irresistible.
But is even this type of expression, more general and pervasive though it be than the types so interestingly studied by M. Goblot—is even this style of expression universal, omnipresent, fundamental? Does it suffice to explain the overwhelming emotional appeal of an organ-fugue of Bach, for example, of which the impression seems to be vague, general, indefinable in specific terms, in the exact measure of its profundity? If "la musique emotive" works at a deeper level and upon a more subconscious element in our nature than "la musique imitative" and "la musique descriptive," is there not still another kind of music, which we may perhaps best call simply "la musique belle," which, addressing still deeper instincts, exercises an even more magical persuasiveness?
The case of the Bach fugue forces us to the conclusion that there is indeed a kind of expression depending neither on the portrayal of natural objects nor on the suggestion of such special feelings as joy and grief, but penetrating by a still deeper avenue to the primal springs of our emotion. The more compelling the experience, it seems, the more is it idealized away from concrete references and provocations in the direction of abstract musical beauty. By presenting to us a perfect piece of form, a highly complex yet ultimately single organism of tones, it calls into full play our most fundamental perceptions; and this satisfying exercise of our faculties gives us a pervasive happiness, a diffused sense of efficient vitality, ineffably more delightful than any particularized emotion or isolated intellectual process. Perfection of form thus turns out to be the most indispensable of all the means of expression at the command of the composer.
Psychological analysis, carried to its legitimate end, verifies, we see, the conclusions of the naÏve musical observer. All expression, for psychology, is the product of an association between two "terms" in the mind—the first that which is given by experience, the expressive object, the second that system of thoughts and feelings at which the mind arrives through the associative act, that which, as we say, is expressed. This being the case, it is evident that, other things being equal, that expression will be most potent the first term of which most deeply stirs our instinctive, subconscious life. When the first term is a basic activity of our minds, such as the perception of a beautiful form, the feelings to which it leads us will have a peculiar depth and amplitude. Our whole organism, like the sounding-board of the well-attuned instrument, will be set in vibration. This is what happens when we listen sympathetically to music that is really beautiful. When, on the other hand, the mental trigger pulled is only some special emotion, so that the stimulation is superficial or local, the impression will reverberate less far-reachingly. We shall be less profoundly moved. And when it is not even an emotion, however special, that starts off the train of thought, but the intellectual concept of some object or event, we shall likely be not so much moved as interested; our curiosity rather than our passions will respond; and we shall call the music bizarre, original, or striking, but hardly beautiful. Something like the same gradation in the power of various appeals, according to their generality, is observable in ordinary life. To read a love-story, labyrinthine in minute detail, is a less seizing experience than to overhear the impassioned speech of some actual lover, even if we catch none of the words; and this in turn commoves us less than to feel in our own frames that boiling of the blood, that surging of the vitals, which is the raw material of love. Brisk exercise on a fine autumn day of sun and wind gives a richer happiness than is dreamed of in our philosophies. It communicates no particular ideas, but attunes our whole being so exquisitely that the fancies spring up spontaneously, like wild-flowers in a fertile meadow. So lovely music simply establishes in us a mood, leaving all the furniture of that mood to our imaginations. And this is why it is that artistic expression, as it becomes more minute and meticulously precise, is apt to lose in persuasive power, and that the composer, if he understands his medium, must needs hesitate long before sacrificing the least degree of beauty, however interstitial and inconspicuous, to any isolated feature of interest, no matter how salient or seductive.
VI
Perhaps it is not too much to hope that the foregoing analysis, incomplete and tentative as it is, affords us something like a rational basis for our instinctive attitudes toward the various types of music. Though its intention is to suggest rather than to dogmatize, it may by this time have fixed clearly in our minds certain fundamental principles of artistic effect; and by constant reference to these it may have established in us a measure of judicial impartiality and poise. Especially, it may have clarified our notions, likely to remain confused so long as they are unconscious, of the essential achievements of the romantic school, both in its lyrical and in its realistic phases, as well as of the peculiar drawbacks and limitations to which it is subject.
The abiding charm of the lyrical work of the romantic composers, typical of which are Schubert's songs, Schumann's novelettes and phantasiestÜcke, and Chopin's nocturnes and preludes, lies in its intimateness, its strong personal flavor. It fascinates us by its impulsive self-revelation, its frankness, spontaneity, and enthusiasm. Its subjectivity and introspection, even when they are troubled or touched with sadness, stir a sympathetic chord in the self-conscious modern breast. To those moods which the classic reticence chills and repels, romantic music speaks with tender, caressing humanity. Even its limitations are then an added appeal; for when we are too weary or dull to brace ourselves to the perception of impersonal beauty, the accent of private grief, aspiration, struggle, and disappointment seems better pitched to our capacity, and has a pathos we can understand. Schumann and Chopin are the best companions for hours of reverie and self-communion. On the other hand, when those hours overtake us in which we realize the pathetic incompleteness of all merely personal life, in which we discern what fragmentary creatures we are, and how little of truth we can ever see, then all living to ourselves alone is touched with the sense of vanity. Then every utterance of our petty private griefs, and even of our nobler but still private joys, seems like a breath dissipated in a universe; we find true existence, solid reality, only in an identification of our interests with those of all mankind. As morals finds its escape from this sense of the vanity of individual living in social devotion, Æsthetics finds it in the impersonality of classic art. Romanticism is sometimes silent, or speaks to unattending ears. We turn from all special expressions, touched as they are with human mortality and evanescence, to the eternal abstract beauty.
If lyrical music is unsatisfactory to these moods of highest vitality and severest demand, realistic music is exasperating, intolerable. When we have nothing better to do it is amusing enough to note the ingenuity with which a composer can introduce the bray of an ass into his delicate tissue of tones, as Mendelssohn does in the "Midsummer Night's Dream Overture," or make three bird-notes sound a harmonic triad as Beethoven does in his "Pastoral Symphony." There is a fascinating technical problem involved in the suggestion of natural noises by musical tones, and when we are indifferent to such technical interests, we may still find diversion in following a series of tonal cues to the events of a familiar story. But when we crave the sublimity of music, when we long to feel once more the thrill of its transcendent beauty, how can we endure to be put off with the barking of a dog, the mewing of a cat, the galloping of a horse, or the crying of a baby? Most program music is incredibly trivial in intention, and gives an impression of maladaptation of means to ends, the former are so elaborate, the latter so paltry and mean. To elicit from a modern orchestra of a hundred instruments a feeble imitation of a battle seems, as some one has piquantly phrased it, "like using a steam-hammer to kill a fly."
We read with impatience the annals of this school. John Mundy, an English composer of the seventeenth century, writes a "Fantasia on the Weather," in four parts: "Faire Weather; Lightning; Thunder; a Faire Day." Adam Krieger, in 1667, composes a four-part vocal fugue "entirely imitative of cats," on a chromatic subject set to the words "Miau, miau." Dussek produces a series of pieces entitled "The Sufferings of the Queen of France," some of which are: "The Queen's Imprisonment" (largo); "She reflects on her Former Greatness" (maestoso); "Her Invocation to the Almighty just before her Death" (devotamente); "The Guillotine drops" (a glissando descending scale); "Apotheosis." We smile patronizingly over these first childish attempts of an art essentially childish. No longer satisfied with such innocent delineations of natural and political history, we must have autobiography, domesticity, and even metaphysics, translated into tones. But will posterity take a truly keener delight in our triumphs of realism than we do in the works of Mundy and Krieger? Already Mr. Arthur Symons, in his essay on Richard Strauss, cries in pardonable irritation: "If I cared more for literature than for music, I imagine that I might care greatly for Strauss. He offers me sound as literature. But I prefer to read my literature, and to hear nothing but music."
Were triviality the only sin of program music we might leave it, without further ado, to the gradual oblivion which overtakes the jejune in art. But, unfortunately, program music not merely bores the music-lover; it does him a positive injury, which criticism ought, so far as it can, to mitigate. By its false emphasis it distracts attention from what music can do supremely to what it can only botch and bungle, brings true masterpieces into discredit with hearers not sensitive or disciplined enough to appreciate them, and plunges the simple into a hopeless Æsthetic quagmire. Pitiable is the frequency of such questions, on the lips of aspiring students, as, "Ought I, when I listen to music, to have in mind a series of pictures, or a story?" To judge by the minuteness of its detail the art which beyond all others is great by virtue of indefinite suggestion, and inspires by appealing to faculties far below the level of intellectual consciousness, is to be sadly duped. "We forget," writes Vernon Lee, "that music is neither a symbol which can convey an abstract thought, nor a brute cry which can express an instinctive feeling; we wish to barter the power of leaving in the mind an indelible image of beauty for the miserable privilege of awakening the momentary recollection of one of nature's sounds, or the yet more miserable one of sending a momentary tremor through the body; we would rather compare than enjoy, and rather weep than admire."
The upshot of all this is, that not even in enjoying the novel delights, the picturesque glimpses, and the fancy-provoking allusiveness which romanticism has introduced into music should we give ourselves too unreservedly to what may be, after all, but a partial and limited pleasure. If these things make us indifferent to deeper beauties they do us a disservice. If, however, we can keep, in spite of their seductions, our sense of proportion, our perception of relative values, we shall enjoy them in security. The romantic movement has undoubtedly led to a widening of our artistic sympathies, has enriched our music with new expressive possibilities and technical resources. It has been one of those periods of ebullience, corresponding perhaps in the consciousness of the race to the storm and stress of adolescence in the individual, which are bound to come so long as we are growing. We cannot fully maintain our poise at the very moment in which we are extending our field of experience; periods of conquest must alternate with periods of assimilation; and as in walking we constantly lose our balance in order to progress, so in mental life we willingly forego control until it can supervene on a broader consciousness.
The romantic composers, eagerly developing the expressive possibilities of music, may have forgotten sometimes in their enthusiasm the organic beauty without which music can never wholly satisfy, but nevertheless they have enriched their art. The available resources of music are to-day more various than ever before. Not only have its mechanical facilities been wonderfully perfected by the ingenuity of the nineteenth century, but its potentialities for vivid and detailed expression have been permanently raised by the subjective intentness of the modern temperament. It remains for future composers to make a new synthesis of all these novel elements, and without sacrificing their vividness to impose upon them the ultimate integrity of impression which at present they too often lack. A classical unity and beauty must supervene upon our romantic multiplicity and interesting confusion. Expression, without losing the minuteness that modern speculation has gained for it, must regain something of the classical serenity. We have had already one musician who, profiting by his heritage, has vied with Schumann in versatility and with Bach in intimacy, who has combined in his single mind something of the sensitive sympathy of the romanticists and the rugged power of the classicists. It may be that Brahms but points the way to a music of the future which will be as grand as it is vivid, as universal in scope as it is personal in accent and inspiration, and in which beauty of form and richness of expression will be reunited in perfect coÖperation to one great artistic end.
FOOTNOTES:
