[This appendix is a slight expansion of an article that originally appeared in the Musical Times for February 1913. One or two points in it have already been dwelt upon in the foregoing pages, but I have ventured to reprint the article here, even at the cost of a little repetition, because in this form it presents concisely and compactly the argument as to the possibility of a further development from Wagner's own principles.]

I

It would be very interesting if some enterprising interviewer in the shades could procure for us Wagner's opinion upon the course of events in music in general and the opera in particular during the thirty years that have elapsed since his death. He would probably cling with his characteristic tenacity to the views he held in his life-time; but if he were candid he would have to admit that the old problems have latterly taken on a new aspect. The theories he expounded so eagerly in his prose works and illustrated so eloquently in his music-dramas have not passed through the fire of thirty years' criticism without suffering some loss of vitality. Supposing a brain as comprehensive, as variously gifted, and as forceful as his were now to take up the problem of opera, seeing it all afresh as Wagner did, and combining, like him, all the potencies of the best instrumental and operatic music of his day into one vast synthesis, what would be the new form he would strike out—for that a new form is now a necessity is evident on a priori and a posteriori grounds. Music could no more stand still after Wagner than after Bach or Beethoven; a new humanity must find a new expression for its own reading of life. And a survey of the opera since Wagner's death leaves no room for doubt that the emotions and aspirations of the new humanity have not yet found the form most appropriate to them. Wagner has no more succeeded in making his special type of musical drama the norm for latter generations than Bach succeeded in imposing the forms of his music upon the art of the epochs that have followed him. In each case the spirit endures, but not the form. Some elements of the Wagnerian form have of course become, as far as we can judge, permanent factors in opera in general,—the use of leading themes, for example, and the system of entrusting a melodious, flowing, quasi-symphonic development to the orchestra. But not even these elements are recognised as indispensable constituents of opera everywhere: Debussy, for instance, discards both of them in the greater part of his Pelleas and Melisande. For the rest, the departures from Wagner's precepts are noticeable enough, especially as regards the poetic basis of opera. Putting aside the negligible work of his second-rate imitators, it would be hard to point to a single opera by a man of original genius that follows Wagner in his reliance upon the primitive myth as the clearest and most fundamental expression of the "purely human," or in his planning of the subject so as to reduce to a minimum the less musical matter in the text, and make the whole opera, as far as may be, a pure expression of nothing but "soul-states."

II

Wagner's famous formula was that hitherto the means in opera (the music) had been taken for the end, and the end (the drama) for the means. His own avowed object was to restore to the drama the right of pre-eminence in opera. His claim to have done so is only valid if we define music and drama in the rather limited senses he had in view when framing his theory. His proposition is correct enough if we take it to mean that music must not, as in the Italian opera, occupy the ear to the exclusion of all worth in the story and all psychological interest in the characters. In the sense that he made opera acceptable to men's heads and hearts as well as their ears, Wagner certainly did make the drama the end, and music the means. But viewed more broadly, his work was really the greatest glorification of music that the theatre had ever seen: for while he enormously increased the expressive scope of the music, he cut out of drama more than half the elements that give that word a meaning apart from music. Drama, with him, meant in the last analysis little more than the best possible text for theatre music. He would have denied this interpretation of his theories and practice, but all the same that is the upshot of them. "Word-speech," he argues, is merely the organ of the intellect, and has therefore the right of entry into music—the emotional art par excellence—only so far as it is necessary to give coherence to the rich but indeterminate flood of feeling that music pours out; and music can, and ought, only to ally herself with words that have themselves an emotional content. It was for this reason that he rejected historical and political subjects, and found the ideal "stuff" for opera in the "purely human" legends of the folk; and in A Communication to my Friends he traces in close detail the gradual growth of his perceptions in this respect. What was hidden from him, what, indeed, he persistently denies, is now evident to everyone else,—that the change in his theories and practice was due to the musician in him slowly asserting himself with greater and greater urgency, and finally demanding imperatively a form of text that would allow his gift of musical expression the utmost possible freedom. It must always be borne in mind that Wagner's theory of a unification of all the arts in the one art-work was the product of a brain that had comparatively little sympathy with, or understanding of, any art but music. This may seem a hard saying, but the proof of it is to be found in many declarations in his prose works, his letters, and Mein Leben. He could never see in painting, in the prose drama, in poetry, and in sculpture, precisely what painters, dramatists, poets, and sculptors saw there. He seriously thought that "the spoken form of play" (die Schauspielform) must "necessarily vanish in the future"; and that painters would give up their "egoistic" decorating of little canvases and be content to devote their powers to contributing, along with the poet, the musician, and the rest of the theatrical forces, to the "united art-work of the future." Clearly it was Wagner the musician who dominated all the other Wagners, and determined both the choice of subject for his operas and the manner of their treatment. "What I saw," he says in A Communication to My Friends, "I now looked at solely with the eyes of music." He is careful to add, not of the formal, cramping style of music, but of the kind that came straight from the heart and which he could pour out like a speech in a mother-tongue. That is the whole secret; the "music" he wishes to see made subordinate to "drama" is merely the music that claims to pursue an egoistic existence, bound by its own arbitrary laws alone; but though his music must be natural and unfettered by conventional formulas, and must aim at giving heightened emotional expression to the feeling suggested by the verse and the action, it is still the predominant partner in the union, and only so much of the stuff of the verbal drama will be permitted in the art-work as will give point to the vague musical emotion without hindering its full expression. Like a true musician, he saw drama from a purely musical angle.

III

But granting the premisses implicit in Wagner's theory,—that music is an art of intensely emotional expression, that it can only ally itself with poetry and drama on the condition that these allow themselves to be bent to its will, and that the ideal "stuff" for an opera is that which contains the minimum of matter that music cannot take up into itself and endow with its own loftier and warmer life,—it surely becomes evident that the theory cannot be allowed to end there. In a long article on programme music in my Musical Studies (1905), I have argued that the strictly logical conclusion of Wagner's own theory is not the music-drama but the symphonic poem. He himself admitted that the more we can refine away from the music-drama all the non-musical matter,—the matter that is required merely to make the nature of the characters and the thread of the story intelligible to an audience sitting on the other side of the footlights—the nearer we shall approach the ideal. It was for this reason that he was dissatisfied with his earlier works, and so proud—justifiably proud—of Tristan, where, as he said, he "immersed himself in the depths of soul-events pure and simple, and from out this innermost centre of the world fearlessly fashioned its outward form. A glance at the volumen of this poem will show you at once that the copious detail which an historical poet has to employ in order to make the outer connections of his plot evident, to the detriment of a clear exposition of its inner motives, I now trusted myself to apply to these latter alone. Life and death, the whole significance and existence of the external world, here turn on nothing but the inner movements of the soul." There is a touch of exaggeration in the claim, but in the main it holds good; Tristan comes nearer to being all music and nothing else but music than any other work of Wagner. I suggested that in the symphonic poem, rightly planned and rightly worked out, we had the nearest possible approach to this ideal, and I availed myself of a simile Browning uses in The Ring and the Book—that of the jeweller who finds it advantageous to mix a certain amount of alloy with the gold while he is working at the ring, but afterwards burns it out with a spirt of acid, leaving simply the circlet of pure gold. The practice of the composer of the symphonic poem seems to me to be analogous to this: he uses the poetic alloy in the conceptual stage of his work to give coherence to the tissue of it, but leaves none of the alloy visible in the completed work itself; to vary the simile, he uses poetry as his scaffolding, but as his scaffolding only. The trouble with opera—viewed from an ideal standpoint—is that it too often shows the scaffolding projecting at a score of points through the finished building. Even in Tristan—especially the earlier scenes—we are too conscious at times of verbal matter that all the genius of the musician has not been able to fuse into music. We accept it, but we are not convinced of the absolute necessity of it.

IV

Apart from theory, we have only to look at a few concrete instances of both types of art to see that the ideal symphonic poem is the unalloyed quintessence of opera, and that the average opera is merely a symphonic poem puffed out to three Acts, and made rather loose of tissue in the process. What could be easier than to make a three-act opera of Ein Heldenleben,—and what more futile? Apart from the Adversaries, there are only two characters in Ein Heldenleben, and we cannot fill up a whole theatrical evening with two characters alone. To have made an opera of it Strauss would have had to get a librettist to surround the only two persons who really matter with a number of minor persons who do not matter in the least; and after spending three or four hours in the theatre we should come away with precisely the same fundamental impression as Ein Heldenleben gives us in the concert-room in about forty minutes,—that a hero has passed through sundry spiritual crises and developments, and at last, after much battling and much error, attained to a super-earthly resignation. This is the ring; everything else we should see and hear in the theatre would only be so much alloy, pleasurable or tiresome. Who does not feel, again, that all the essential emotions of the story of Francesca da Rimini are given us in Tchaikovski's tone-poem? Who wants to see the merely historical and topographical details that would be inevitable in an opera on the subject? Who wants to see the furniture of the house of Malatesta, and the ladies and gentlemen moving about among it? Who wants to see and hear Giovanni? He interests us only as a fragment of the force of fate that drives Paolo and Francesca to love and death; surely we are content to accept his existence as assumed in the great central tragedy, without having him put before us in the flesh to sing a lot of words that do not matter? Who does not feel that Strauss has given us the quintessence of Macbeth in his symphonic poem, and that no opera on that subject could hope to express the spiritual tragedy of Macbeth so swiftly and so drastically? Or, to look at the matter from the other side, take the case of Strauss's Salome. Does anything really count there but the train of moods in Salome's soul, and is not all this expressed fully and incomparably in the great final scene,—with perhaps a little assistance from the music of the impassioned monologue of Salome to Jochanaan in the earlier part? What is all the rest of the opera but a mere recital or representation of a story the details of which everyone in the theatre already knows quite well? How Herod was married to Herodias, the mother of Salome, how Herod gave a banquet and became enamoured of his step-daughter, how one Jochanaan, a Jewish prophet, had been imprisoned by order of Herod, how Salome conceived an unholy passion for Jochanaan, how she danced for Herod and won as her reward the head of Jochanaan on a charger—who needs to go to the theatre to be told all this: who takes more than the most languid interest in the telling of it? Music has next to no concern with most of it, because it is of a quality that prevents music attaining to its full emotional incandescence; and it is only when it is playing with ease and ardour round a subject fit to call out the best there is in it that music is really worth writing. If anyone doubts that it is only the final scene and the monologue of Salome that count for anything in the opera, let him ask himself how many people would stay away from the theatre or the concert-room because only these portions were being given, and how many people would go to the theatre if it were known that these portions were to be omitted. Or again, does the whole opera of TannhÄuser tell us very much that is not already told us in the Overture? I am not alleging, of course, that there is not a great deal of very interesting music in the opera. The question is whether the essence of the struggle in TannhÄuser's soul between spiritual and physical love is not fully given us in the Overture, and whether, had this alone been written, we should have felt any more need for an opera upon the subject than we do for an opera on the subject of Ein Heldenleben. What is the opera of Fidelio, Wagner himself asked, but a mere lengthy watering down of the dramatic motives that have been painted so finely for us in the great Leonora No. 3 Overture? May we not say as much of TannhÄuser? Is not a great deal of this also a mere padding-out of the subject to comply with the exigencies of a whole evening in the theatre?

V

It is true that Wagner tried to demonstrate that the symphonic poem was a less perfect art-form than the music-drama, inasmuch as it left it to the imagination to supply the characters, the events, or the pictures upon which the music is founded, whereas these really ought to be shown to the eye upon the stage. But a two-fold answer can be given to Wagner. In the first place, there are dozens of passages in his own works that depend for their effect upon precisely that visualising power of the imagination the legitimacy of which he denied in the case of the symphonic poem. Is Siegfried's Rhine Journey, for example, intelligible on any other supposition than that with each change of theme in the music the hearer's imagination visualises a fresh episode in the hero's course? How do we listen to the Meistersinger Overture except just in the way we listen to a symphonic poem—the imagination calling up before it the bodily presence of each of the characters in turn? In the second place, the evidence is overwhelming that Wagner's own imagination was much more restricted in this respect than that of other people; and it was precisely this inability to trust very much to the visualising power of the imagination that made him fall into so many crude errors of realism. All his life through he was unable to see that the imagination has a much wider scope than the eye, because, not being tied down to the mere spatial dimensions of an object, it can add enormously to it out of its own store of memory and vision. Vastness is a quality inseparable from any concept of a god; but can the grandest creation of sculpture or the most heroic of stage figures ever hope to give us such a sense of the illimitable power and beauty of godhead as the imagination can supply? Whose god comes nearest to filling the earth with his presence—the invisible one of Milton or Spinoza, or the visible Wotan of Wagner? Does not the least analytical spectator of a Wagnerian opera often feel that it would have been better if the composer had insisted less on material facts upon the stage and left our imagination a freer wing? How much of the exquisite poetry of the idea of the Waldweben—the natural, untainted boy at home in nature's heart, dowered by his native innocence with the gift of understanding the song of birds—is spoiled for us by the grossly unideal presence of the average actor, by the reduction of the wayward breath and infinite soul of nature to a few yards of painted pasteboard, and by the narrowing down of all our ideas of the lyric freedom of bird-life to one poor piece of stuffed mechanism jerked at the end of a wire, and a tremulous soprano somewhere up in the wings? Who would exchange the imagination's vision of the glorious Valkyrie-flight through the storm and the cloud-wrack for the actual visible Grane, with his evident air of having been borrowed from the mews round the corner? Who that is moved by the Grail music in Parsifal has not felt his heart sink within him at the sight of the slow mechanical evolutions of the Knights in the Grail scene at Bayreuth? Who has not felt at the sight of the "property" swan that the rarefied atmosphere of Monsalvat has gone, and with it most of the remoteness, the shining whiteness, of Lohengrin? Or, not to multiply instances of this kind from the Wagnerian operas themselves, who can doubt the general proposition that the more the subject approaches the sublime the more it demands purely poetic or musical treatment, and the more lamentably it suffers by being narrowed down to a canvas or a stage? What painter could hope to suggest, even in the largest picture, the vision of the vast evil form of Lucifer, the mighty sweep of his fall, and the horror of the fiery underworld, that Milton can give us in a line or two;[413] and who, in spite of all the splendour of the music of the Ring, does not feel that the actual spectacle of gods and heroes that has been put before our eyes on the stage cannot compare in true sublimity with the picture given us in the great opening lines of Morris's Sigurd the Volsung:

"There was a dwelling of kings ere the world was waxen old;
Dukes were the door-wards there, and the roofs were thatched with gold;
Earls were the wrights that wrought it, and silver nailed its doors;
Earls' wives were the weaving-women, queens' daughters strewed its floors,
And the masters of its song-craft were the mightiest men that cast
The sails of the storm of battle adown the bickering blast.
There dwelt men merry-hearted, and in hope exceeding great
Met the good days and the evil as they went the way of fate:
There the gods were unforgotten, yea whiles they walked with men,
Though e'en in that world's beginning rose a murmur now and then
Of the midward time and the fading and the last of the latter days,
And the entering in of the terror, and the death of the People's Praise."

How the imagination fills out the ample spaces here left to it to play among—how great and god-like and noble and beautiful a world of men and women it is that the poet evokes for us!

VI

The elimination from an opera-text of everything that is not suited to musical expression is perhaps an unattainable ideal. It is only the titanic musical genius of Wagner that makes us more or less tolerant of what we may call the baser metal in the structure of his music-dramas. Since his day the problem has proved so baffling a one that composers have frankly given it up in despair. Wagner was right: the simpler the story or legend on which we found an opera,—the more it can be trusted to make its own motives and development clear,—the less non-musical matter shall we be burdened with, and the more chance we shall have of being able to keep the musical tissue on a consistently high level. The proof of this is to be found not only in Wagner's own work but in that of his successors. It is hardly possible to recall a modern opera in which, at some point or other, the composer has not tried to delude us into the belief that the music means something when it really means nothing. Take, for example, the opening scene of Elektra. The scene is dramatically necessary because it informs the spectator of the relations between Elektra and her mother, and explains the miserable servitude of the maiden in the house of her murdered father. But no man that ever lived could set such words as these to good music; and all that Strauss can do is to make a mere pretence of writing music, let the orchestra play almost anything and the voices shriek almost anything, and trust to the audience being carried blindly along, partly by the excitement of the noise, partly by the bustling stage-movement. Wagner's superior artistic sense would have seen from the outset that this part of the libretto was outside the sphere of music, and, being his own librettist, he would, in obedience to the prompting of the musician in him, have so re-shaped the opera that there would have been no need to communicate that particular piece of information to us in this particular form. The procedure of Strauss and Hofmannsthal is hardly less absurd than that of the old composers who used to set to music not only the actual words of the Bible but "Here beginneth the ... chapter of the ... book of...."

How much of the merest putty, again, is left visible in the libretti of Puccini, Charpentier, and others—passages that are essential if the story is to be made clear to the spectator, but absolutely defying musical treatment. There is scarcely a single opera of which the music gives one the impression of pure necessity from first to last; every now and then our teeth are set on edge by some pieces of grit left by the bad cooks in an otherwise good dish. The handling of passages of this kind has become the most stereotyped of formulÆ; the characters talk rather than sing, while the orchestra keeps the ear interested by playing pretty tunes on its own account, much as a nurse tells a child fairy tales to keep it quiet during the misery of the bath. Only the easy-going attitude towards all questions of form that is bred in us by theatrical art could possibly blind us for a moment to the helplessness and ineptitude of a method of this kind. Debussy evades the difficulty in another way. He starts with a text that is already a complete, self-sufficing work of art, capable, without the assistance of music, of holding an audience interested in it by virtue of its own dramatic life and its fine literary quality. He is thus, to begin with, in a far stronger position than that of nineteen opera composers out of twenty, whose texts have no artistic quality of their own, and have to receive the whole breath of their life from the music. Having the good fortune to be working upon a libretto that is itself moving and beautiful, Debussy can frequently afford to leave it to speak for itself, his own contribution to it being sometimes no more than a momentary heightening of the force of the words by means of a poignant harmony or a suggestive touch of colour. I hope I shall not be held to be insensitive to the peculiar charm of Debussy's Pelleas and Melisande, or to the rare musical invention of the more continuous portions of it, if I say that a good deal of the opera could have been written by a much less gifted man. Now that the novelty of it has passed off, it is seen to be not at all a difficult matter to subtilise a stage effect by the addition of a poignant chord here and there. Pelleas and Melisande is an extremely beautiful work, but it will probably have no posterity,—because, while the more musical portions of it depend less for their effect on any essential novelty of form than upon the very individual quality of Debussy's imagination, the style of the other—the merely atmospheric—portions is so easy to imitate that it is within the scope of dozens of composers with only a quarter of Debussy's genius. Debussy, then, has not, any more than his contemporaries, solved the problem of weaving the combined vocal and orchestral tissue of the opera into a continuous and homogeneous whole; for a great part of the time he simply evades the problem. Pelleas and Melisande is a tour de force that will probably never be repeated; it depended for its success on the concurrence of a number of factors that are hardly likely to be met with in combination again.

VII

To recapitulate, then, for a moment: Wagner's theory of the ideal music-drama is sound enough, but neither he nor any of his successors has been able to realise the theory in practice. In every combination of music with the other arts it must of necessity play the leading rÔle, because of the greater expansiveness and superior warmth of its expression.[414] As Wagner saw, it will tolerate no text but one that is thoroughly musical in essence—that is to say, one that is so purely emotional throughout that at no time can we feel that in order to associate with it music has had to descend from its ideal sphere. It is in the process of making the action clear to the spectator that opera generally has to admit certain elements that drag music down from its high estate. We have therefore at present two chief forms of the association of poetry and music—the opera, in which actual characters, using actual words, are shown to us in the actuality of the stage, and the symphonic poem, in which we are given not the characters but the emotions of the characters, and not the scene but an imaginative suggestion of the scene, while the general nature of the subject is communicated to us by means of a printed explanation or a title. This necessity of putting the hearer en rapport with the story by a device that stands outside the music seems to many people an ineradicable flaw in the symphonic poem; a work of art, they say, should be self-contained, and opera, with all its admitted faults, has the virtue of being its own explanation. I do not think, however, that this matter is so simple as it looks.

Closer analysis will show first of all that many apparently self-contained musical works are as greatly in need of verbal expression as a symphonic poem, and secondly, that in the full sense of the term hardly any opera or drama can be said to be wholly self-explanatory, inasmuch as, at every hearing of it except the first, we witness the unfolding of the earlier stages of the action with a knowledge of the later stages, and are thus as effectually adding something from an outside source to the visual and auditory impressions of the moment as when we follow a symphonic poem with the story in our minds that we have just read in the programme book. What real difference, for example, is there between the frame of mind in which we listen to the TannhÄuser Overture and that in which we listen to Ein Heldenleben? In each case we are conscious that the music is not self-existent and self-explanatory, but depends for its full intelligibility on our knowledge of the characters and incidents upon which it is based. We get this knowledge in the case of Ein Heldenleben from a book; in the case of the TannhÄuser Overture we get it from our experience of the opera on the stage.[415] What essential difference is there between the two cases? In each of them we have to rely upon experience outside the work itself in order to grasp the full meaning of it. The TannhÄuser Overture and other works of that class are, in fact, artistic solecisms. No one, surely, will contend that at the first performance of TannhÄuser the Overture conveyed its poetic meaning to the audience any more clearly than a performance of Ein Heldenleben would do without a literary explanation of its contents. The Overture does not explain the opera, but is explained by it, and it is consequently absurd to play it first. It only happens to come first because the old practice of having an orchestral introduction to an opera was unthinkingly retained long after the character of the introduction had so altered that there was no longer any sense in its use. The purpose of the Overture originally was simply to play the audience into their seats. We see it performing this function in an overture like that to the Messiah: the music has nothing to do with the oratorio, and any one of a hundred other orchestral introductions would do just as well. But when opera composers began to make the overture a summary of the opera itself, they entered upon a course that ultimately made it an absurdity. In so far as the overture sums up the opera, and therefore depends for its intelligibility on a knowledge of the opera, it ought logically to be played not at the commencement of the evening, but at the end. Modern composers have instinctively recognised the truth of all this, and the operatic overture is now virtually abolished; there is none, for instance, to Salome, Elektra, or Pelleas and Melisande.

All the overtures, then, that epitomise the opera with which they are connected are in the same category as the symphonic poem; for an understanding of the literary basis of them we have to go to a source outside themselves. The theory that a piece of music is bad music unless it is "self-sufficing" and "self-explanatory" is a mere nightmare of the arm-chair Æsthetician. There are thousands of pages in Bach that only yield up their full secret to us when we get some outside light upon the sequence of poetic ideas in his mind at the time of writing. This is the case with many of the chorale preludes, for example. But Bach's music is often rich in a kind of allusive symbolism greatly resembling Wagner's use of the leading motive, though it is bolder than that, inasmuch as the musical symbol has not been made familiar to us by a previous definite use of it in the same work of art. In the Christmas Oratorio Bach sets the words of a chorale addressed to the infant Jesus to the music of another chorale that was already associated in the minds of the congregation with the Passion—thus in a flash bringing the death of the Saviour into the same mental picture as the birth.[416] The chorale fantasia which the blind old man dictated to his pupil Altnikol a few days before his death united the music of the hymn "In our hour of direst need," with the words of "I come before thy throne." And who can forget the effect, comparable to some of the most thrilling of those that Wagner makes with his leading motives, of the trumpet pealing out with the melody of "Great God, what do I see and hear! The end of things created" in the midst of the bass recitative describing the terrors of the Day of Judgment (in the cantata Wachet, betet). Bach anticipated, as he did most things in modern music, the Wagnerian use of the leading motive, the function of which is to suggest to the hearer's imagination another idea simultaneously with the one the music is explicitly expressing. I think Bach would have smiled at anyone who chose to object that his chorale in the Christmas Oratorio was not self-sufficing, inasmuch as it depended for its affecting double meaning upon knowledge that the hearer had gathered elsewhere. He would probably have been satisfied with the unshakable fact that the hearer had this knowledge, and that it was therefore quite safe to rely on his making use of it. Surely the composer of the symphonic poem and allied forms is also justified in trusting occasionally to his auditors' outside knowledge of the subject of his work. Is there anything less legitimate in Strauss's trusting to our imagination to summon up at performance the scenes and the figures of Don Quixote, than there is in Wagner's trusting to it, during the TannhÄuser or Meistersinger Overture, to summon up the scenes and figures of the opera? I have already pointed out that in his music-dramas Wagner is continually asking us, by means of recurrent leading motives, to visualise more than is actually set before us on the stage—thus flying in the face of his own theoretical arguments. It only needs to be added that he also relied, at times, as much as the writer of symphonic poems does, upon the hearer's or spectator's knowing more about the course of the drama than has been revealed to him in the drama itself. How do we know, for example, that the "Sword" motive in the final scene of the Rhinegold is a "Sword" motive at all? How do we know the train of thought running through Wotan's mind at this point as he looks into the future? Simply by antedating the information we have gained from the later dramas of the Ring. At the time the "Sword" motive is first heard there has never been the slightest suggestion of the sword that is to help to lift the curse from the gods; not only Siegfried but Siegfried's parents are as yet unborn. Again, the phrase that TannhÄuser sings to the words "Ha, jetzt erkenne ich sie wieder, die schÖne Welt der ich entrÜckt" in the first Act of the opera is explained only by the association of it with Elisabeth and the Hall of Song in the second Act. Anyone with a knowledge of the Wagnerian operas can multiply these instances for himself.

Does not everything, in fact, point to the impossibility of our listening to any performance of a drama or opera, except the first one, with a mind that is absolutely a clean slate? Are we not always drawing consciously or unconsciously upon our store of acquired knowledge of the work, and blending this with the visual or auditory impressions of the moment? Do we not all know, long before it happens, that the screen will fall down at a certain climactic point in the School for Scandal and show us Lady Teazle hiding behind it? Is not our appreciation of all the dialogue of this scene whetted by our knowledge—gained from "outside" sources—of what is going to happen at the end of it? The instructed spectator or reader invariably keeps looking ahead, his interest or delight in what is occurring at the moment being intensified by what may be called anticipatory memory. It is only at the first time of reading Tom Jones that we can be in the slightest doubt as to who is the hero's mother. The ever-present clue to the solution of the mystery does not spoil our pleasure, however, in the second and subsequent readings; nay, it rather adds to it, for it makes us conscious of a number of cunning strokes of construction that we had not noticed at the first reading. At the second and every subsequent performance of Mr. John Galsworthy's The Pigeon a thrill of horror goes through us at the exit of Mrs. Megan in the second Act, for we know—what we did not know at the first performance—that she means to throw herself into the river; and for this reason the second performance necessarily makes a profounder effect on us than the first. I take it, then, that an exaggerated importance can be attached to the principle of art being "self-sufficing" and "self-explanatory" at the first time of hearing or seeing; the subject is a far more complex one than the amateur Æstheticians have imagined. They had only to turn to the Greek drama to see a form of art in which deliberate advantage was taken by every author of the fact that the audience had an "outside" knowledge of the characters and events of the play. The Greek drama, broadly speaking, did not rely, as ours does, on the effect of a slow unfolding of a complicated plot—the main art of which consists in first of all giving the audience something to hunt for and then finding it for them. The Greek drama was based on a myth or a legend every detail of which was known to every member of the audience. At a first performance, therefore, the audience would be in precisely the same position as a modern audience is when it reads in its programme-book the analysis of a new symphonic poem that is about to be performed. And this knowledge, so far from diminishing the audience's enjoyment of the drama, actually intensified it, and permitted to the author an amount of subtle psychological allusion that can only be compared with the effects of the leading motive in modern opera. When Clytemnestra, for instance, in Æschylus's drama, greets Agamemnon with falsely-fawning words, the thrill that ran through the Athenian audience came not from any feeling of foreboding inspired by the visible situation or the actual words, but from its outside knowledge that all this was feigning, and that the hounds of death were already hot on the track of the unsuspecting king. Wagner would have flashed the same light upon Clytemnestra's words by means of an orchestral motive. An Athenian, again, at the first performance of the Œdipus Rex, must have known the whole of the story from the beginning. There could be for him none of the cumulative surprise at the slow unravelling of the web that we feel at a first reading of the tragedy; rather did he accompany the first blind steps of Œdipus with a pity born of the knowledge—the outside knowledge—of the doom the gods had woven for him.

VIII

If, then, there is no Æsthetic falsity involved in assuming some previous knowledge of the action or the motive on the part of the spectator, or in communicating this knowledge by other means than a stage presentation, why should we not boldly recognise that the time is ripe for a new form of art that shall carry the potency of music a step further than it was carried by Wagner? After all, it is the music that counts for ninety-five per cent, of our enjoyment of a Wagner opera. The "philosophy" of the Ring may be something to write or read about in the study, but in the theatre it really goes for very little. It is interesting to talk about the Schopenhauerian or Hindoo significance of the discourse of the lovers, in the second Act of Tristan, upon Love and Death, and Night and Day; but again—for how much does this count in the theatre? Has there ever been a single spectator, since Tristan was first given, who could make out from the performance alone what philosophy it was the lovers were talking, or whether they were talking philosophy at all? And how many people who do know the text at this point—because they have read it—feel in the theatre that very much of the essential emotion of the work would be lost if the characters sang Chinese words, or Choctaw words, or no words at all, so long as the music was left to tell its own tale? I must guard against possible misunderstanding here. I am not for a moment urging that speech should henceforth be banished from opera as a mere superfluity.[417] There are many subjects in which it will always be a necessity; the world of the Meistersinger, for instance, could have been made real to us in no other medium than that of music with words. But I do contend that there are many poetic subjects in which virtually the whole of the expression could be entrusted with perfect safety to music alone,—not necessarily in the form of a symphonic poem, but in a sort of drama without actors—if the paradox may be permitted—or with speechless actors. And could we not in this way approach a step nearer to the ideal musical art-work, in which all the needful suggestiveness of poetry was retained without any admixture of the cruder non-musical elements that at present merely go to make plot and persons intelligible to the auditor?

IX

Maeterlinck and others have of late familiarised us with the idea of a "static" as distinguished from the older "dynamic" drama. It is highly probable that in the future men will go to the theatre craving the satisfaction of rather different desires from those they seek to satisfy there now. That "drama" is capable of more than one meaning is proved by the existence of dramatic forms so varied as those of the Greek drama, the Shakespearean drama, the Maeterlinckian drama, the Atalanta in Calydon of Swinburne, The Dynasts of Mr. Thomas Hardy, and the Getting Married of Mr. Bernard Shaw. It is quite reasonable to suppose, therefore, that a new generation may read another new meaning into the word. Among the finer minds of the present day there is a decided movement away from what seems to them the crudity of the old-style "well-constructed" drama of action. Maeterlinck, in one or two of his essays, has given eloquent expression to the feelings that inspire this movement of revolt. Many of the time-honoured dramatic "motives" are already sadly discredited. The dagger and the poison-bowl no longer play the part in tragedy that they used to play. Humanity has come to see that things of this kind are the mere excrescences of a dramatic action,—the mere crude outward and visible signs of desires and passions working in secret in the souls of men,—and their gaze is being turned more and more on the psychological springs of action rather than on the visible actions themselves. Drama, in the hands of thoughtful poetical writers, is becoming more and more an affair of the inner rather than the outer man; and it is probable that, as time goes on, still less reliance will be placed on the crude stage effect of violent action. It need hardly be said that as drama dispenses with piece after piece of action and explanation, and comes deeper down to the essence of tragedy as a war of impulses in a man's soul or of the fates about his path, it approaches more nearly to the mood of music. We may look in the future to a yet further purging of poetic drama of many of the tedious conventional devices on which it is still dependent so long as it has to play off a number of characters against each other like chessmen on a few square yards of board in a theatre. I think I can foresee the time when most of what now passes for "plot interest"—the pretence on the author's part of hiding something merely in order that it may in due time be triumphantly found again—will be regarded as something almost childish in the naÏve quality of its appeal, and will be relegated to forms of art as much below the general intellectual level of the literature of the day as the detective story is below the intellectual level of our own better novels and dramas. The more artistic the race becomes, the less will it crave for mere facts and events in drama, and the more for an imaginative reading of the soul on which the facts and events have written their record. Again let me interpolate a word of warning against a misunderstanding of my thesis. I am not supposing that a time will ever come when the drama as we have it now will have disappeared from the stage. I fully recognise that there are certain dramatic concepts that can never be adequately expressed except by means of clashing and marching and counter-marching characters, and action more or less violent or clockworklike. But I fancy that in the not distant future the more poetic side of man will demand a form of art in which very little happens or is told, but in which the soul of the spectator is flooded by emotions of pity and sorrow and love that are all the more penetrating because they do not come to us through the relatively cold medium of words and the childish, creaking clockwork of exits and entrances and surprises and intrigue.

X

It is this attitude of the artistic mind of the future towards drama that will, I think, find utterance in a form of quasi-dramatic music in which we shall be rid of all or most of the mere scaffolding of narration or action that serves at present simply to give intellectual support to the music of opera. Even in Wagner are we not painfully conscious at times of the fact that the music, which matters a great deal, is being diluted and made turbid by a quantity of baser matter the only function of which is to make it clear to us why these particular people are there at that particular moment, and what it is that they are doing? It cannot be reiterated too often that it is only the music that can keep alive any form of art into which music enters. The mere facts in an art-work lose their force with repetition; it is only artistic emotion that can be born anew again and again and yet again. Who feels anything but a glow of rapturous anticipation when the first notes of the Liebestod or of Wotan's Abschied are sounded? He may have heard it all a hundred times before, and know every note of it by heart; but it will all be as new and wonderful and inevitable to him at the hundredth hearing as at the first. But who does not involuntarily emit a groan from the very depths of his being when Wagner's first care at the moment is not to kindle us with great music but to tell us through Wotan's lips at great length, and for the hundredth time, certain mere facts that have long lost their absorbing interest for us. And even in his most compact work, Tristan, is there not a great deal that is, from the highest point of view, superfluous? We can bear to hear the same glorious music time without number; but we will not bear being told time without number who Tristan and Isolde and Marke and Morold are, and how Tristan slew Morold, and how Isolde nursed Tristan back to health, and all the rest of it. I can imagine a Tristan in which things of this kind would be assumed to be matters of common knowledge on the part of the audience, as the characters and motives of Tchaikovski's Romeo and Juliet or Francesca da Rimini are assumed to be common knowledge, or those of Strauss's Macbeth or Till Eulenspiegel, or those of Beethoven's Coriolan and Egmont Overtures or the Leonora No. 3, or those of Dukas's L'Apprenti Sorcier. Then the whole of the composer's time and the audience's attention could be devoted to that full musical exposition of nothing else but the protagonists' "soul-states" and "soul-events" which Wagner avowed as the ideal of music-drama, but which is virtually an impossible ideal so long as opera is compelled to utilise so many actors on so much and no more of a stage, and to occupy precisely so many hours of an evening.

As it happens, we already have in the Greek drama,—especially that of the older type,—a form of poetic art strongly resembling that which I am here suggesting might be now produced in music. Not only did the old Greek dramatist, as we have seen, largely rely on the audience's knowledge of the characters and events of his play, and so save himself the necessity of much action or much scene-shifting, but he cast the drama into a concentrated form that enabled him to appeal rather to the spectator's sense of poetry than to the mere delight in external catastrophe and the unravelling of plot; while in the chorus he had under his hand an instrument capable of extraordinary emotional expression. The Greek drama, in fact, was singularly akin to the music-drama of Wagner. As Wagner saw, the true modern equivalent of the Greek chorus is the orchestra; it is at once part of the action and aloof from it, an ideal spectator, sympathising, commenting, correcting. The Greek drama resembles ideal opera, again, in that the ultimate sentiment disengaged from it is one not of facts shown, or of interest held by the mere interplay of intrigue, but of a high poetic spirit, purifying and transfiguring the common life of things.

Is not this form capable of further development? Is it not possible to construct an art-form in which the mere facts that it is necessary for us to know are either assumed as known or set before us in the briefest possible way, so that music can take upon itself the whole burden of expression, and the whole work of art be nothing but an outpouring of lofty, quintessential emotion? Can we not imagine something like the second Act of Tristan with silent and only dimly visible actors, the music, helped by their gestures, telling us all that is in their souls, while they are too remote from us for the crude personality of the actors and the theatrical artificiality of the stage-setting to jar upon us as they do at present? Cannot some story be taken as so well known to everyone that only the shadowiest hints of the course of it need be given to the spectator, the real drama being in the music? Or, to go a step further, cannot we dispense altogether with the stage and the visible actor, such external coherence as the music needs being afforded by impersonal voices floating through a darkened auditorium? [418] The effect of disembodied voices can be made extraordinarily moving; in all my experience of concert-going I can remember no sensations comparable to those I felt during the Grail scene from Parsifal at one of the Three Choirs Festivals; the exquisite beauty of the boys' voices floating down from one knew not where was something almost too much for mortal senses to endure. Here, in the concealed, impersonal choir, is an instrument, I think, the full emotional power of which is not yet suspected by composers. It lends itself admirably to just that desire for the exploration of the mysteries around us that music is always endeavouring to satisfy. As the cruder kind of action goes out of drama, the hovering Fates will come in. Mr. Hardy, in The Dynasts, has given us a hint of what may be done by a partial reversion to the Greek type of drama, the purblind, struggling human protagonists being surrounded by an invisible chorus of Fates that see to the hidden roots of things. A poetic scheme of this kind could be made extremely impressive by music,—say a series of orchestral pictures of human desires and passions, having a simple intellectual co-ordination of their own, with an invisible chorus commenting upon it all now and then in the style of the Fates of Mr. Hardy or the chorus of Æschylus. There are, I think, several possible new art-forms open to us when we shall have learned to dispense, for certain purposes, with the actor and his speech, to rely upon the audience's previous knowledge of some story of universal interest and significance, and to leave it to music alone to express the whole of the dramatic or poetic implications of the story. But it is perhaps vain to try to forecast these future developments by means of reason. They will certainly come, but not by theorists taking thought of them; they will have to be born, as the Wagnerian drama was, out of the burning need of some great soul.

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