p359s
[PDF][[audio/mpeg]
The ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is by many considered Berlioz’s finest work. It is in two parts, the first including a number of choruses and recitatives narrating the course of the tragedy, and the second developing various pictures selected out of the action. The love scene is ‘pure’ music of the highest beauty, and the scherzo, based on the ‘Queen Mab’ speech, is one of Berlioz’s most typical inventions.
All these compositions antedate by a number of years the works of Liszt and Wagner, which make extended use of Berlioz’s means. Wagner describes at length how the idea of leit-motifs occurred to him during his composition of ‘The Flying Dutchman’ (completed in 1841), but he was certainly familiar with Berlioz’s works. Liszt was from the first a great admirer of Berlioz, and greatly helped to extend his reputation through his masterly piano arrangements of the Frenchman’s works. His development of the leit-motif in his symphonic poems is frankly an adaptation of the Berlioz idea.
Liszt’s dramatic symphonies are two—‘Dante’ and ‘Faust’—by which, doubtless, if he had his way, his name would chiefly be known among the nations. We have seen in an earlier chapter how deeply Liszt was impressed by the great paintings in Rome, and how in his youth he dreamed of some later Beethoven who would translate Dante into an immortal musical work. In the quiet of Weimar he set himself to accomplish the labor. The work is sub-titled ‘Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise,’ but it is in two movements, the Purgatory leading into, or perhaps only to, the gate ofHeaven. The first movement opens with one of the finest of all Liszt’s themes, designed to express Dante’s
p360s[PDF][[audio/mpeg]
[PDF][[audio/mpeg]
lines: ‘Through me the entrance to the city of horror; through me the entrance into eternal pain; through me the entrance to the dwelling place of the damned.’ And immediately another motive for the horns and trumpets to the famous words: ‘All hope abandon, ye who enter here.’ The movement, with an excessive use of the diminished seventh chord, depicts the sufferings of the damned. But presently the composer comes to a different sort of anguish, which challenges all his powers as tone poet. It is the famous episode of Paolo and Francesca da Rimini. It is introduced by another motive of great beauty, standing for the words: ‘There is no greater anguish than, during suffering, to think of happier times.’ In the Francesca episode Liszt lavishes all his best powers, and achieves some of his finest pages. The music now descends into the lower depths of the Inferno, and culminates in a thunderous restatement of the theme, ‘All hope abandon,’ by the horns, trumpets and trombones. The second movement, representing Purgatory, strikes a very different note, one of hope and aspiration, and culminates in the LatinMagnificat, sung by women’s voices to a modal tune, which Liszt, now once more a loyal Catholic, writes from the heart.
The ‘Faust’ symphony, written between 1854 and 1857, is hardly less magnificent in its plan and execution. It is sub-titled ‘three character-pictures,’ and its movements are assigned respectively to Faust, Gretchen, and Mephistopheles. Yet the last movement merges into a dramatic narration of the love story and of Faust’s philosophic aspirations, and reaches its climax in a men’s chorus intoning the famous final chorusfrom Goethe’s drama: ‘All things transitory are but a semblance.’ The Faust theme deserves quoting because of its chromatic character, which has become so typical of modern music:
p361s
[PDF][[audio/mpeg]
The whole work is in Liszt’s most exalted vein. The ‘character pictures’ are suggestive in the extreme, and are contrasted in the most vivid manner. Liszt has rarely surpassed in sheer beauty the Gretchen episode, the theme of which later becomes the setting for Goethe’s famous line, ‘The eternal feminine leads us upward and on.’ These two works—the ‘Dante’ and the ‘Faust’—are doubtless not so supremely creative as Liszt imagined, but they remain among the noblest things in modern music. Their great difficulty of execution, even to orchestras in our day, stands in the way of their more frequent performance, but to those who hear them they prove unforgettable. In them, more than in any other of his works, Liszt has lavished his musical learning and invention, has put all that was best and noblest in himself.
The most typical musical form of to-day—the symphonic poem—is wholly the creation of Liszt. The dramatic symphony attained its highest development at the hands of its inventor; later works of the kind, such as Raff’s ‘Lenore Symphony,’ have been musically of the second or third rate. It is quite true that a large proportion of the symphonies of to-day have some sort of general program or ‘subject,’ and nearly all are sufficiently dramatic in feeling to invite fanciful ‘programs’ on the part of their hearers. But few composers have cared or dared to go to Berlioz’s lengths.The symphonic poem, on the other hand, has become the ambition of most of the able orchestral writers of our day. And, whereas Berlioz has never been equalled in his line, Liszt has often been surpassed, notably by Richard Strauss, in his.
Curiously enough, Berlioz, who was by temperament least fitted to work in the strict symphonic form, always kept to it in some degree. The most revolutionary of spirits never broke away wholly from the past. Liszt carried Berlioz’s program ideas to their logical conclusion, inventing a type of composition in which the form depended wholly and solely on the subject matter. This latter statement will almost serve as a definition of the symphonic poem. It is any sort of orchestral composition which sets itself to tell a story or depict the emotional content of a story. Its form will be—what the story dictates, and no other. The distinction sometimes drawn between the symphonic poem and the tone poem is largely fanciful. One may say that the former tends to the narrative and the latter to the emotional, but for practical purposes the two terms may be held synonymous.
In any kind of musical narration it is usually necessary to represent the principal characters or ideas in particular fashion, and the leit-motif is the natural means to this end. And, though theoretically not indispensable, the leit-motif has become a distinguishing feature of the symphonic poem and inseparable from it. Sometimes the themes are many (Strauss has scores of them in hisHeldenleben), but Liszt took a particular pleasure in economy of means. Sometimes a single theme served him for the development of the whole work. He took the delight of a short-story writer in making his work as compact and unified as possible. In fact, the formal theory of the symphonic poem would read much like Poe’s well known theory of the short story. Let there be some predominantcharacter or idea—‘a single unique effect,’ in Poe’s language—and let this be developed through the various incidents of the narration, changing according to the changing conditions, but always retaining an obvious relation to the central idea. Or, in musical terms, select a single theme (or at most two or three) representing the central character or idea, and repeat and develop this in various forms and moods. This principle brought to a high efficiency a device which Berlioz used only tentatively—that oftransformation. To Liszt a theme should always be fluid, rarely repeating itself exactly, for a story never repeats itself. And his musicianship and invention show themselves at their best (and sometimes at their worst) in his constant variation of his themes through many styles and forms.
But such formal statement as this is vague and meaningless without the practical application which Liszt gave it. The second and in many respects the noblest of Liszt’s symphonic poems is the ‘Tasso, Lament and Triumph,’ composed in 1849 to accompany a festival performance of Goethe’s play at Weimar on the hundredth anniversary of the poet’s birth. The subject caught hold of Liszt’s romantic imagination. He confesses, like the good romanticist that he is, that Byron’s treatment of the character appealed to him more than Goethe’s. ‘Nevertheless,’ he says in his preface to the work, ‘Byron, in his picture of Tasso in prison, was unable to add to the remembrance of his poignant grief, so nobly and eloquently uttered in his “Lament,” the thought of the “Triumph” that a tardy justice gave to the chivalrous author of “Jerusalem Delivered.” We have sought to mark this dual idea in the very title of our work, and we should be glad to have succeeded in pointing this great contrast—the genius who was misjudged during his life, surrounded, after death, with a halo that destroyed his enemies. Tasso loved and suffered at Ferrara; he was avenged at Rome; hisglory still lives in the folk-songs of Venice. These three elements are inseparable from his memory. To represent them in music, we first called up his august spirit as he still haunts the waters of Venice. Then we beheld his proud and melancholy figure as he passed through the festivals of Ferrara where he had produced his master-works. Finally, we followed him to Rome, the eternal city, that offered him the crown and glorified in him the martyr and the poet.’ A few lines further Liszt says: ‘For the sake, not merely of authority, but the distinction of historical truth, we put our idea into realistic form in taking for the theme of our musical hero the melody to which we have heard the gondoliers of Venice sing over the waters the lines of Tasso, and utter them three centuries after the poet.’ The theme is one of the finest in the whole Liszt catalogue. We need hardly go to the length of saying that its origin was a fiction on the part of the composer, but doubtless he changed it generously to suit his musical needs. Yet his evident delight in its pretended origin is typical of the man and the time; romanticism had a sentimental veneration for ‘the people,’ especially the people of the Middle Ages, and a Venetian gondolier would naturally be the object of a shower of quite undeserved sentimental poetry. The whole story, and the atmosphere which surrounded it, was meat for Liszt’s imagination.
p364s
[PDF][[audio/mpeg]
This is the theme—a typical one—which Liszt transforms, ‘according to the changing conditions,’ to delineate his hero’s struggles, the heroic character of the man; his determination to achieve greatness; his ‘proud and melancholy figure as he passed through the festivals at Ferrara’—the theme of the dance itself is developed from the Tasso motif:
p365s-1
[PDF][[audio/mpeg]
and then his boisterous acclamation by the crowd in Rome:
p365s-2
[PDF][[audio/mpeg]
And here, for a moment, the listener hides his face. For Liszt has become as cheap as any bar-room fiddler. His theme will not stand this transformation. It happens again and again in Liszt, this forcing of a theme into a mold in which it sounds banal. No doubt the acclamations of the crowdwerebanal (if Liszt intended it that way), but this thought cannot compensate a listener who is having his ears pained. It is one of the regrettable things about Liszt, whose best is very nearly equal to the greatest in music, that he sometimes sails into a passage of banality without seeming to be at all conscious of it. Perhaps in this case he was conscious of it, but stuck to his plan for the sake of logical consistency. (The most frenzied radicals are sometimes the most rigid doctrinaires.) The matter is worth dwelling on for a moment, because it is oneof the most characteristic faults of the great man. In the present case we are compensated for this vulgar episode by the grand ‘apotheosis’ which closes the work:
p366s[PDF][[audio/mpeg]
[PDF][[audio/mpeg]
Such is the method, and it is in principle the same as that since employed by all composers of ‘symphonic poems’—of program music in fact.
Liszt’s symphonic poems number twelve (excluding one, ‘From the Cradle to the Grave’ which was left unfinished at the time of his death). When they are at their best they are among the most inspiring things in modern music. But Liszt’s strange absence of self-criticism mingles with these things passages which an inferior composer might have been suspicious of. In consequence many of his symphonic poems have completely dropped from our concert programs. Such ones as the ‘Hamlet,’ theFestklänge, and ‘What is to Be Heard on the Mountain,’ are hardly worth the efforts of any orchestra.Les Préludes, on the other hand, remains one of the most popular of our concert pieces. Nowhere are themes more entrancing than in this work, or his structural form more convincing. ‘The Ideal,’ after Schiller’s poems, was one of Wagner’s favorites among the twelve, but is uneven in quality. ‘Orpheus,’ which is less ‘programmistic’ than any of the others, in that it attempts only an idealized picture of the mythical musician, is worked out on a consistently high plane of musicianship. ‘Mazeppa,’ narrating the ride of Byron’s hero tied on the back of a wild horse, is simply an elaboration and orchestral scoring of one of the piano études published as Liszt’sopus 1 in 1826. The étude was even entitled ‘Mazeppa,’ and was descriptive of the wild ride, so we may, if we choose, give Liszt the credit of having schemed the symphonic poem form in germ before he became acquainted with the works of Berlioz. ‘Hungaria,’ a heroic fantasy on Hungarian tunes, should have been, one would think, one of the best of Liszt’s works, but in point of fact it sounds strangely empty, and exhibits to an irritating degree the composer’s way of playing to the gallery. TheFestklängewas written, tradition says, to celebrate his expected marriage with the Princess von Wittgenstein, and, in view of Huneker’s remark that Liszt accepted the Pope’s veto to this project ‘with his tongue in his cheek,’ we may assume that its emptiness was a true gauge of his feelings. In most of these works there is more than one chief theme, and sometimes a pronounced antithesis or contrast of two themes. In this classification falls ‘The Preludes,’ which, in attempting to trace man’s struggles preparatory to ‘that great symphony whose initial note is sounded by death,’ makes use of two themes, each of rare beauty, to depict the heroic and the gentle sides of the hero’s nature, respectively. The antithesis is more pronounced in ‘The Battle of the Huns,’ founded on Kalbeck’s picture, which is meant to symbolize the struggle between Christianity (or the Church) and Paganism. The Huns have a wild minor theme in triplets, and the Church is represented by the Gregorian hymn,Crux Fidelis.
Thus by works as well as by faith Liszt established the musical type which best expressed his fervent romantic nature. The symphonic poem form, coming to something like maturity at the hands of one man, was a proof of his intellectuality and his high musicianship. We may wish that he had written less and criticized his work more, but many of the pages are inescapablein their beauty. In them we are in the very heart of nineteenth-century romanticism.
Since the early days of violent opposition to Berlioz and Liszt the question of the ‘legitimacy’ of program music has not ceased to interest theorists. There are not a few writers to-day who stoutly maintain that the program and the pictorial image have no place in music; that music, being constructed out of wholly abstract stuff, must exist of and for itself. They wish to have music ‘pure,’ to keep it to its ‘true function’ or its ‘legitimate place.’ Music, they say, can never truly imitate or describe outward life, and debases itself if it makes the unsuccessful attempt.
Yet program music continues to be written in ever-increasing abundance, and, though from the practical point of view it needs no apologist, it boasts an increasing number who defend it on various grounds. These theorists point to the ancient and more or less honorable history of program music, extending back into the dark ages of the art. They mention the greatest names of classical music—Bach and Beethoven—as those of composers who have at least tried their hand at it. They show that the classic ideal of the ‘purity of the arts’ (by no means practised in classical Greece, by the way) has broken down in every domain, and that some of the greatest works have been produced in defiance of it. And, arguing more cogently, they point out that whether or not musicshouldevoke visual images in people’s minds, evoke them it does, and in a powerful degree. WhenTod und Verklärungmakes vivid to the imaginations of thousands the soul’s agonies of death and ecstasies of spiritual resurrection, it is no better than yelping at the moon to moan thatthis music is not ‘pure,’ or is out of its ‘proper function.’
Undoubtedly it is true that music which attempts to be accurately imitative or descriptive of physical objects or events is not worth the trouble. Certainly bad music cannot become good merely by having a program. But it is to be noted that all the great composers of program music insisted that their work should have a musical value apart from its program. Even Berlioz, as extreme as any in his program music, recorded the hope that hisFantastique, even if given without the program, would ‘still offer sufficient musical interest in itself.’ As music theFantastiquehas lived; as descriptive music it has immensely added to its interest and vividness in the minds of audiences. And so with all writers of program music up to Strauss and even Schönberg, with hisPelleas und Melisande(though Schönberg is one of the most abstract of musicians in temperament).
Further, good program music throws its emphasis much more on the emotional than on the literal story to be told. Liszt rarely describes outward events. He is always depicting some emotion in his characters, or some sentimental impression in himself. And there are few, even among the most conservative of theorists, who will deny the power of music to suggest emotional states. If so, why is it not ‘legitimate’ to suggest the successive emotional states of a particular character, as, for instance, Tasso? The fact that a visual image may be present in the minds of the hearers does not alter the status of the music itself. If we admit this, then we can hardly deny that the composer has a right to evoke this image, by means of a ‘program’ at the beginning.
The fact is that not one listener in a hundred has any sense of true absolute music—the pure ‘pattern music’ which is as far from emotions and sentiments asa conventional design is from a Whistler etching. Even the most rabid of purists, who exhaust a distinguished vocabulary of abuse in characterizing program music, may expend volumes of emotion in endeavoring to discover the ‘meaning’ of classical symphonies. They may build up elaborate significations for a Beethoven symphony which its composer left quite without a program, making each movement express some phase of the author’s soul, or detecting the particular emotion which inspired this or that one. They will even build up a complete programmistic scheme foreverysymphony, ordaining that the first movement expresses struggle, the second meditation, the third happiness, and the last triumph—and more of the like. They will enact that a symphony is ‘great’ only in so far as it expresses the totality of emotional experience—ofspecificemotional experience, be it noted. This sort of ‘interpretation’ has been wished on any number of classical symphonies which were utterly innocent of any intent save the intent to charm the ear. And nearly always the deed has been done by professed enemies of program music.
But, in spite of the fact that the instinct for programs and meanings resides in nearly every breast, still thereisa theoretical case for absolute music. There is nothing to prove that music, in and of itself, has any specific emotional implications whatsoever. It is merely an organization of tones. As such, since it sets our nerves tingling, it can indeed arouse emotion, but notemotions. That is, it can heighten and excite our nervous state, but what particular form that nervous state will take is determined by other factors. In psychological language, it increases our suggestibility. Under the nervous excitement produced by music a particular emotional suggestion will more readily make an impression, and this impression will become associated in our minds with the music itself.The program is such a suggestion. In a more precise way the words and actions of a music drama supply the suggestion. Of course, we have been so long and so constantly under the influence of musical suggestions that music without a particular suggestion may have a more or less specific import to us. Slow minor music we are wont to call ‘sad,’ and rapid major music ‘gay.’ But this is because such music has nearly always, in our experience, been associated with the sort of mood it is supposed to express. Somewhere, in the course of our musical education, there came the specific suggestion from outside.
But this discussion is purely theoretical. The practical fact is that music, thanks to a complex web of traditional suggestion, is capable of bringing to us more or less precise emotional meanings—or even pictorial meanings, for there is no dividing line. And this fact must be the starting point for any practical discussion of the ‘legitimacy’ of programme music. Starting with it, we find it difficult to exclude any sort of music on purely abstract grounds. Any individual may personally care more for ‘abstract’ music than for program music; that is his privilege. But it is a very different thing to try to ordain ‘legitimacy’ for others, and legislate a great mass of beautiful music out of artistic existence.
After all, the case reduces to this: that an ounce of practice is worth a ton of precept. And the successful practice of program music is one of the chief glories of the romantic movement. Whatever may have been the faults of the period, it demonstrated its faith by deed, and the present musical age is impregnated with this faith from top to bottom.
H. K. M.