Solution Manual for Microsoft Visual C 2012 An

Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming, 5th

Edition download

http://testbankbell.com/product/solution-manual-for-microsoft-
visual-c-2012-an-introduction-to-object-oriented-programming-5th-
edition/
TestBankBell.com: Your Ultimate Source for Test Banks and Academic Resources

TestBankBell.com is a leading online platform offering instant access to a wide

variety of test banks and academic resources. Whether you're a student, educator, or
professional, we provide the tools and materials you need to excel in your studies and
career. Our website features test banks for textbooks across multiple disciplines,
offering comprehensive solutions to enhance your learning experience.

Keywords:
test bank, academic resources, study guides, test preparation, testbankbell, download test
bank, textbook solutions

Contact Information:
Visit us at: https://testbankbell.com - For inquiries, email us:
testbankbell.com@gmail.com

Important Links:
Download Test Banks: https://testbankbell.com/

Copyright © 2025 TestBankBell. All Rights Reserved.

 Instant digital products (PDF, ePub, MOBI) ready for you
Download now and discover formats that fit your needs...

Start reading on any device today!

Test Bank for Programming with Microsoft Visual Basic

2012, 6th Edition

https://testbankbell.com/product/test-bank-for-programming-with-
microsoft-visual-basic-2012-6th-edition/

testbankbell.com

Solution Manual for An Introduction to Programming with

C++, 8th Edition

https://testbankbell.com/product/solution-manual-for-an-introduction-
to-programming-with-c-8th-edition/

testbankbell.com

Solution Manual for Programming with Microsoft Visual

Basic 2015, 7th Edition

https://testbankbell.com/product/solution-manual-for-programming-with-
microsoft-visual-basic-2015-7th-edition/

testbankbell.com

Test Bank for Visual C# 2012 How to Program, 5/E 5th

Edition : 0133379337

https://testbankbell.com/product/test-bank-for-visual-c-2012-how-to-
program-5-e-5th-edition-0133379337/

testbankbell.com
Solution Manual for Programming with Microsoft Visual
Basic 2017 8th by Zak

https://testbankbell.com/product/solution-manual-for-programming-with-
microsoft-visual-basic-2017-8th-by-zak/

testbankbell.com

Introduction to Programming Using Visual Basic 10th

Edition Schneider Solutions Manual

https://testbankbell.com/product/introduction-to-programming-using-
visual-basic-10th-edition-schneider-solutions-manual/

testbankbell.com

Solution Manual for Microsoft Visual Basic Programs to

Accompany Programming Logic and Design, 8th Edition Jo Ann
Smith
https://testbankbell.com/product/solution-manual-for-microsoft-visual-
basic-programs-to-accompany-programming-logic-and-design-8th-edition-
jo-ann-smith/
testbankbell.com

Solution Manual for Starting out with Visual C# 2012, 3/E

3rd Edition : 0133129454

https://testbankbell.com/product/solution-manual-for-starting-out-
with-visual-c-2012-3-e-3rd-edition-0133129454/

testbankbell.com

Test Bank for Systems Analysis and Design: An Object-

Oriented Approach with UML, 5th Edition by Dennis, Wixom,
Tegarden
https://testbankbell.com/product/test-bank-for-systems-analysis-and-
design-an-object-oriented-approach-with-uml-5th-edition-by-dennis-
wixom-tegarden/
testbankbell.com
Solution Manual for Microsoft Visual C
2012 An Introduction to Object-Oriented
Programming, 5th Edition

Full download chapter at: https://testbankbell.com/product/solution-

manual-for-microsoft-visual-c-2012-an-introduction-to-object-oriented-
programming-5th-edition/
Develop the strong programming skills in Visual C# you need for success
with Farrell's MICROSOFT VISUAL C# 2012: AN INTRODUCTION TO
OBJECT-ORIENTED PROGRAMMING, 5E. Engaging examples and a
straightforward approach help readers establish solid skills in both
structured and object-oriented programming, introducing critical principles
and techniques that are easily transferrable to other programming
languages. This edition incorporates the most recent versions of both C#
and Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 with approachable "You Do It" sections,
Video Lessons for each chapter, and a variety of new debugging exercises,
programming exercises, and case studies to keep readers actively
involved.

Develop the strong programming skills in Visual C# you need for

success with Farrell's MICROSOFT VISUAL C# 2012: AN INTRODUCTION
TO OBJECT-ORIENTED PROGRAMMING, 5E. Engaging examples and a
straightforward approach help readers establish solid skills in both
structured and object-oriented programming, introducing critical
principles and techniques that are easily transferrable to other
programming languages. This edition incorporates the most recent
versions of both C# and Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 with approachable
''You Do It'' sections, Video Lessons for each chapter, and a variety of
new debugging exercises, programming exercises, and case studies to
keep readers actively involved.
Other documents randomly have
different content
Without making too wide a digression into the æsthetics of music,
we can see that the tendency to write the one kind of music is as
deeply rooted in us as the tendency to write the other kind. Some
musicians, by constitutional bias, take the one route, some the
other; but neither party has the right to assume that the kind of
music it prefers is the only kind. Hence it is an error to say that
music is stepping out of her own province when she becomes
programme music. Her real province includes both absolute and
programme music; the one is as inherent in us as the other.
But for reasons that will become apparent later, the absolute branch
of the art developed more rapidly than the poetical branch. Even by
the time absolute music had come to its magnificent climax in
Beethoven, programme music had really done nothing at all of any
permanent value. Many composers seemed to have a vague idea
that purely instrumental music could be made to convey suggestions
of real life just as poetry does, and just as the song does; but they
had not yet learned where to begin and where to end, what was
worth doing in this line and what was not worth doing. Their
attempts at programme music were mostly crude imitations of
external things, in a language not yet rich enough to express what
they wanted to say; they contain, for our ears, rather too much
programme and rather too little music. In the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries the minds of the men who tried to write
poetic music for instruments alone, ran in two main directions. They
either wrote pieces musically interesting in themselves, and gave
them fanciful titles, such as "Diana in the wood," "The virtuous
coquette," "Juno, or the jealous woman," and so on, or they frankly
began with the intention of representing appearances and events in
music. Thus in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book we have pieces with the
titles, "Faire wether," "Calm wether," "Lightening," "Thunder," and "A
clear day." These things were not confined to one country; they are
met with all over Europe. Occasionally the programme writers
worked through vocal as well as instrumental forms. Muffat wrote
pieces of the "Diana in the wood" order. Jannequin described the
battle of Malegnano in music, Hermann the battle of Pavia. In the
seventeenth century Carlo Farina wrote orchestral pieces in which
the voices of animals were imitated. Buxtehude wrote seven klavier-
suites, describing in music the nature and quality of the seven
planets. Frescobaldi did a battle capriccio. Frohberger wrote a suite
showing the Emperor Ferdinand IV. making his way up into heaven
along Jacob's ladder. Frohberger, indeed, was realistic beyond the
average. He not only painted nature, for example, but indicated the
locality as accurately as a geography or a guide-book could do; and
it was not merely humanity in general that moved about among his
scenes, but the Count this or the Prince that. In some suites, that
are unfortunately lost to an admiring world, he painted a storm on
the Dover-Calais route, and gave a series of pictures of what befell
the Count von Thurn in a perilous journey down the Rhine. [25]
All this seems very crude now, but the very prevalence of the
practice points to a widespread feeling in those times that music
could be made to serve as an art of representation. Indeed, a much
earlier example of this tendency can be quoted, showing that even
the ancient Greeks had their programme-music writers. There is a
passage in the Geography of Strabo, in which he describes what he
heard at Delphi. Here, he says, they had a musical contest "of
players on the cithara, who executed a pæan in honour of Apollo.
The players on the cithara were accompanied by players on the
flute, and by citharists, who performed without singing. They
performed a melos (strain) called the Pythian mood. It consisted of
five parts—the anacrusis, the ampeira, cataceleusmus, iambics and
dactyls, and pipes. Timosthenes, the commander of the fleet of the
second Ptolemy, and who was the author of a work in ten books on
Harbours, composed a melos. His object was to celebrate in this
melos the contest of Apollo with the serpent Python. The anacrusis
was intended to express the prelude; the ampeira, the first onset of
the contest; the cataceleusmus, the contest itself; the iambics and
dactyls denoted the triumphal strain on obtaining the victory,
together with musical measures of which the dactyl is peculiarly
appropriated to praise and the iambics to insult and reproach; the
syrinxes and pipes described the death, the players imitating the
hissings of the expiring monster." [26] The unsympathetic may say it
is to be hoped that the gentleman was a better admiral than he
seems to have been a musician.
But to get back to modern Europe again. These crude imitations of
birds and beasts and the rolling of the waves are not programme
music; they are the rawest part of the raw material out of which
programme music is made. The difficulty is to make the piece
interesting both as music, and as a representation of what it
purports to describe. A composer may fling a phrase before us and
tell us this represents Hamlet, or Othello, or a death-rattle, or the
Israelites crossing the Red Sea, or anything else he likes; but unless
the phrase has an interest of its own, and unless he can satisfy our
musical as well as our literary sense by the way he handles and
combines and transforms it in the sequel, he will not arrest our
attention. The great problem, indeed, of both the modern symphonic
poem and the modern opera is to tell a story adequately and at the
same time to satisfy our desire for interesting musical development.
If the composer fixes his attention too exclusively on the literary part
of his subject, his work will lack organic musical unity; if he is too
intent on achieving this, he will probably fail in dramatic definiteness.
This, I shall soon try to show, is really the crux both of opera and of
programme music; and if we rarely succeed in solving so knotty a
problem, it is not to be wondered at that the solution did not come
to the men of the sixteenth or seventeenth or eighteenth century.
As a matter of fact, however, one old composer did try to effect a
union of the programme purpose with some real sense of musical
form. This was Johann Kuhnau (1660?-1722), who, in his six Bible
Sonatas, describes "the fight between David and Goliath," "the
melancholy of Saul being dissipated by music," "the marriage of
Jacob," and so on. Kuhnau was a really remarkable man. He was a
good musician who could write interesting clavier-pieces apart from
any programme scheme. He was moreover a keen-witted man who
tried to think out seriously the problem of the union of musical
expression and poetical purpose, so far as any man in those days
could do so. In the preface to the Bible Sonatas he points out that
the musician, like the poet, prose-writer, and painter, often wants to
turn his hearers thoughts in a particular direction. If he wants to
express in his music not merely sadness but the sadness of this or
that individual—to distinguish, as he says, a sad Hezekiah from a
weeping Peter or a lamenting Jeremiah—he must employ words in
order to make the emotion definite. But not necessarily, be it
observed, by writing the music to the words, as in a song. His own
plan is to illustrate his subject in music, and make his poetic purpose
clear to us by giving a detailed verbal account of it. Thus he prefaces
each of his Bible Sonatas with an elaborate account of the event it
deals with, and then summarises the main motives. This, for
example, is the summary of the first Sonata, after a long general
introduction. The Sonata expresses, he says—

1. The stamping and bravado of Goliath.

2. The trembling of the Israelites, and their prayer to God at sight
of their awful enemy.
3. The courage of David, his desire to break the proud spirit of the
giant, and his childlike trust in God's help.
4. The contest of words between David and Goliath, and the
contest itself, in which Goliath is wounded in the forehead by
the stone, falls down, and is slain.
5. The flight of the Philistines, and how they are pursued by the
Israelites, and slaughtered with the sword.
6. The jubilation of the Israelites over the victory.
7. The chorus of the women in praise of David.
8. And, finally, the general joy, finding vent in vigorous dancing
and leaping.

It will be seen at once that the programme here is of a different kind

from those of some of Kuhnau's predecessors and contemporaries. It
does indeed aim at representing some external things—such as the
stamping of Goliath, the impact of the stone against his head, and
so on—but they are not inherently absurd or impossible; while he
gives a great deal of his space to the really emotional moments of
the story. Throughout the sonatas, however, it is the poetic purpose
that directs the music, determining both expression, sequence, and
form. Every episode that occurs in the story has to be represented in
the music; and Kuhnau is careful to print, in his score, the verbal
indication at the precise point where the music follows it. He tells us
the exact bar at which the stone is aimed at Goliath, and the bar in
which the giant falls down; where Laban begins to practise his deceit
on Jacob, where Jacob is "amorous and contented," and where "his
heart warns him that something is wrong"; and so on—thereby
setting an example to composers like Strauss, who foolishly give the
purchaser of such a score as Till Eulenspiegel no guide to the various
adventures of the hero. Some of Kuhnau's devices provoke a smile,
as in the Fifth Sonata—"Gideon, the Saviour of the People of Israel."
The sign to Gideon was that the fleece was to be wet with dew, but
the ground dry; the next night the ground was to be wet and the
fleece dry. Kuhnau naïvely expresses the second sign by giving the
theme of the first sign in contrary motion. But all naïvetés apart, a
great deal of the music of the Sonatas is very fine; and it is
noteworthy that Kuhnau points out, in his general preface, that the
writer of programme music must be allowed more liberty than the
absolutist to break a traditional "law" when the expression demands
it. [27] Kuhnau, indeed, was on the right path. He was a man born
before his due time; had he lived in our days, and had at his
command all the resources of modern expression and our enormous
orchestras, he might have taken up very much the same position
towards music as the modern programmists.
John Sebastian Bach, who succeeded Kuhnau at the Thomas Church
in Leipzig, made one, and only one, experiment in the same line.
This was the "Capriccio on the departure of my dearly beloved
brother." The first movement, he says, depicts "The cajoleries of
friends, trying to induce him to give up the idea of the journey"; the
second is "a representation of the various things that may happen to
him in foreign lands"; the third gives utterance to a "general lament
of his friends as they say good-bye to him"; and the finale is a fugue
on the postillion's signal.
Bach, however, made no further attempt to develop along these
lines. The work he had been sent into the world to do was of
another order.
About the same time Couperin, in France, was cultivating the
programme genre with some success. He not only wrote harmless
little things with titles like "La Galante," but also connected pieces of
musical delineation, such as "The Pilgrims." Like Kuhnau, he justified
his principles in a preface. "In the composition of my pieces," he
says, "I have always a definite object or matter before my eyes. The
titles of my pieces correspond to these occasions. Each piece is a
kind of portrait."
In Rameau again, we get such things as "Sighs," "Tender Plaints,"
"The Joyous Girl," "The Cyclops," etc.; and at a slightly later date
Dittersdorf (1739-1799) wrote twelve programme symphonies,
illustrating Ovid's "Metamorphoses" and "The War of Human
Passions."
Mozart's father wrote a musical description of a sledge-journey, in
which the ladies are represented shivering with the cold; but Mozart
himself avoided the programme form as positively as Bach. Haydn,
however, dabbled in it more extensively, as I have already pointed
out.
Beethoven's position in the history of programme music is somewhat
peculiar. Just about that time, when the Napoleonic wars had
familiarised every one with the pomp of armies, there was a perfect
deluge of battle pieces. There was probably not a battle of any
importance in those days that had not a fantasia written upon it,
each differing from the others in little else but its title. In a weak
moment Beethoven succumbed to the general temptation and wrote
his "Battle of Vittoria," which is not only one of the least significant
of his works, but one of the least significant works in the history of
programme music. Beethoven's real contributions to this form of art
were indirect rather than direct. He told one of his friends that he
had always a picture in his mind when composing; and if this could
be taken quite literally, it would seem as if we were on the trail of
programme music pure and simple. But we shall probably never
know the extent to which Beethoven relied on poetic suggestions for
his musical inspiration; and if we look at the internal evidence of his
music, we shall see that although it often deals with poetic subjects,
it treats them from the standpoint of the old forms rather than from
that of the new. So far as their intellectual origin is concerned, the
superb Leonora, Egmont, and Coriolan overtures are poetic music;
that is, they aim, in a musical texture, at sketching a character or
telling a story. But so far as the form is concerned in which the
composer has chosen to work, the procedure is determined almost
entirely by the laws of absolute music. Wagner has drawn attention
to this in a well-known passage in his essay on "Liszt's Symphonic
Poems." He shows what the formal laws of the old symphony were,
and how necessary they were to give logical coherence to abstract
music. But, he says, when these laws were applied
uncompromisingly to a different kind of art-work—the overture—a
disturbance occurred at once between the aims of the overture and
the demands of the symphonic form. All that the latter was
concerned with was change—the constant representation of themes
in new lights. The overture had, in addition to this, to concern itself
with dramatic development. "Now it will be obvious," he says, "that,
in the conflict of a dramatic idea with this form, the necessity must
at once arise either to sacrifice the development (the idea) to the
alternation (the form), or the latter to the former." He goes on to
praise Gluck's Iphigenia in Aulis overture for the skilful way it keeps
the dramatic development from being spoiled by compliance with
extraneous laws of form. Then, he says, Beethoven, working on a
bigger scale and with a more stupendous imagination than Gluck,
nevertheless came to grief on the rock Gluck managed to escape.
"He who has eyes," says Wagner, "may see precisely by this overture
(i.e. the great Leonora No. 3), how detrimental to the master the
maintenance of the traditional form was bound to be. For who, at all
capable of understanding such a work, will not agree with me when
I assert that the repetition of the first part, after the middle section,
is a weakness which distorts the idea of the work almost past all
understanding; and that the more, as everywhere else, and
particularly in the coda, the master is obviously governed by nothing
but the dramatic development. But whoso has brains and lack of
prejudice enough to see this, will have to admit that the evil could
only have been avoided by entirely giving up that repetition; an
abandonment, however, which would have done away with the
overture-form—i.e. the original, merely suggestive, symphonic
dance-form—and have constituted the departure-point for creating a
new form."
Wagner is undoubtedly right. Beethoven hovered uncertainly at
times between the demands of poetic expression and the demands
of absolute form. To write poetic music pure and simple, of course,
was not his mission in the world. That was reserved for other men.
One side of his powerful genius was to be taken up by Wagner and
pushed to its logical conclusion in the music-drama. Another side,
cultivated by Berlioz, Liszt, and Richard Strauss, comes to its logical
end in the symphonic poem; and just as Wagner criticised the
Beethoven overture from the standpoint of music-drama, I propose,
shortly, to criticise Wagner from the standpoint of the symphonic
poem. I shall try to show that so far from the Wagnerian opera
representing, as Wagner thought, the ideal after which the music of
Beethoven was striving, it is really only a transitional form; and that
the symphonic poem is the completely satisfactory, completely
logical form, to which the Wagnerian opera stands in the same
relation as the Leonora overture does to Tristan and Isolde.

VI
Before embarking on this æsthetic argument, however, let us briefly
conclude our historical view of the development of programme
music. It was with the Romantic movement that the infusion of
poetry into music became complete, and at the same time the
vocabulary and the colour-range of music became adequate to
express all kinds of literary and pictorial ideas. The older musicians
could not, if they had tried, have written the modern symphonic
poem or the modern song. And this for several reasons. In the first
place, they were pretty fully occupied with making music the
language it now is; they had to form a vocabulary and think out
principles of architecture; and the last thing they could have done
was to leave the safe and formal lines of their own art—safe because
they were precise and formal—and plunge into a mode of expression
that would have seemed to them to offer no coherence, no guiding
principle. In the second place, they lacked one of the main stimuli to
the development of modern programme music, the suggestion of a
vivid, living, modern, highly emotional and picturesque poetry. A
Schumann, a Brahms, a Franz could not have written such songs as
they have done in any century but this; for the mainspring of their
songs has been the emotional possibilities contained in the words. It
was only when composers really felt the deepest artistic interest in
the words they were setting, instead of regarding them as merely a
frame for musical embroidery, that they attained the modern veracity
and directness of phrase. You cannot do much more with words like
those of the older song or opera than set them with a view to their
purely musical rather than their musico-poetical possibilities; and if
you persist, out of deference to a foolish tradition, in setting to
music the words of a foreign and relatively unfamiliar language, you
will perforce become more and more conventional in your phrases
and in your general structure. It was the peculiar advantage of the
modern German song-writers that they could set lyrics of their own
language, alive with every suggestion that could lend itself to
musical treatment. The emotion was intense, the form concentrated
and direct, the idea definite and concise; and the musicians, having
by this time a fully developed language for their use, set themselves
to reproduce these qualities of the poem in their music. Hence the
new spirit that came into music with the Romantic movement, and
that reacted on opera, on piano music, and on the symphonic poem.
Another great difference between the pre-Romantic and the post-
Romantic composers was that the latter were, on the whole, much
more cultured men than the former. This was due, of course, not to
any particular merit of their own, but to the changed social
circumstances of the musician. The system of patronage in the
eighteenth century, while it undoubtedly helped the musician to
develop as a musician, must have retarded his development in other
ways. Under that system, where he was often little better than the
servant of some aristocrat, he must often have been debarred from
studying the world at first-hand, meeting it face to face, looking at it
through his own eyes. Neither Haydn [28] nor Mozart, for example,
stood on the level of the best culture of the time. The great German
historian of music, Ambros, has pointed out how, in Mozart's letters
from Italy, the talk is all of the singers and dancers; "he scarcely
seems to have noticed the Coliseum and the Vatican, with all that
these contain." And Ambros goes on to say that the modern
musician reads his Shakespeare and his Sophocles in the original,
and knows them almost by heart. He reads Humboldt's Cosmos and
the histories of Niebuhr and Ranke; he studies the dialectic of Hegel
as well as, or perhaps more than, the art of fugue; and if he goes to
Italy he does not trouble himself about the opera, but occupies
himself with nature and the remains of classic art. He is, in fact, says
Ambros, "Herr Microcosmos." [29]
For a fair picture of the ordinary life of a musician in the house of his
patron in the eighteenth century we have only to turn to the
Autobiography of Dittersdorf. Among them all, indeed, Gluck and
Handel seem to be the only musicians who possessed much culture,
[30] and who strike us as

being, apart from music, the intellectual equal of the great men of
the time—of Voltaire, Rousseau, Condorcet, Diderot, Lessing, and
the rest. There is no evidence that Beethoven was either a man of
wide culture, or a respectable thinker outside his own art. It is,
indeed, probable that the enormous musical power of many of these
men, and the centuries of progress through which they rushed music
in comparatively a few years, was due to their being nothing else but
musicians, to the concentration of all their faculties, all their
experiences, upon the problem of making sound a complete, living,
flexible medium of expression. But the later musicians were of
another order. The Romantic movement bred a new type of
musician. He no longer sat in the music-room of an aristocrat,
clothed in the aristocrat's livery, and spun music out of his own inner
consciousness. He moved about in the world and saw and learned a
good deal. He associated with poets; he frequented the studios of
painters. We get men like Hoffmann, at once novelist, painter,
musician, and critic; like Liszt, pianist, composer, author; like
Schumann, musician and musical critic; like Wagner, ranging greedily
over the whole field of human knowledge, and mixing himself up—in
more senses than one—with every possible and impossible subject
under the sun. I am not using the term in any offensive or
disparaging sense when I say that the average modern musician, in
matters outside music, is a much better educated and more all-
round man than his predecessor; he knows more, sees more, reads
more, thinks more. Men like Wagner, Brahms, Richard Strauss, Hugo
Wolf, and Bruneau, stand much closer to the general intellectual life
of their day than any of the older musicians did to the intellectual life
of his day. I am not for a moment contending that they are any
greater musicians merely on this account; I simply state it as a
psychological factor in their work, as something that determines, to
a great extent, the quality of that work, and certainly determines
their choice of subjects.
The way it does this is by making them anxious to express in their
music all the impressions they have gathered from the world and
from their culture. But in order that they might do this, two things
were necessary, as we have already seen. The vocabulary of music—
its range of melody and harmony—had to be increased, and the
capacity of the orchestra had to be enormously developed. It is folly
to laugh at the men of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for
not getting on further with poetical music. They had not the means
at their disposal to do so. Sonata-form grew up to a great extent on
the piano and the violin; and the nature of these instruments largely
determined what could and should be uttered upon them. It was not
till harmony got richer and deeper and fuller, and men had learned
to extract all kinds of expression from the orchestra, that programme
music in the true sense of the word became possible.
The broad historical facts, then, are that the stimulus to poetic music
in the nineteenth century came from the wider education of the
musician, the great development of the means of musical
expression, and the incessant stimulation of the musician by poetry
and literature in general. [31] As we know, the new spirit broke out
in three forms—in the highly emotional song of Schubert,
Schumann, Brahms, Franz, and the others; in the poetical music-
drama of Wagner; and in the symphonic poems or programme
symphonies of Berlioz, Liszt, Tchaikovski, Raff, and a dozen others,
leading up to Richard Strauss. Even the men who did not actually
dabble much in the last-named form helped the cause of
instrumental poetic music in other ways. Schumann, for example,
with his poetic little piano pieces, his delicate sketches of character
in the Carneval and Papillons and elsewhere, was really following up
the same trail as led to Liszt's Mazeppa, Berlioz's Harold en Italie,
and Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel.

VII
On two lines of inquiry, then, we have found the case for programme
music somewhat stronger than its hasty opponents have imagined.
On the one hand, we have seen that when the nature and origin of
music are psychologically analysed, there are two mental attitudes,
two orders of expression, and two types of phrase, from one of
which has arisen absolute, from the other, programme music. On the
other hand, we have seen that, from a variety of reasons,
programme music could not have been cultivated by the great
masters of the eighteenth century who beat out the form of the
classical symphony; while its fascination for the modern men is due
to its being the only medium of expression for a certain order of
modern ideas. It is quite time, then, that not only critics but
composers realised that when the brains are out the form will die;
that you cannot write a symphony in the form of Mozart or
Beethoven unless your mental world is something like theirs, and
that if the literary, or pictorial, or dramatic suggestion is all-potent
with a composer, it is folly for him to throw it aside, and try, by using
a form that is uncongenial to him, to get back into an emotional
atmosphere it would be impossible for him to breathe.
The change that came over music about the beginning of the
nineteenth century, and that first came to full fruition in Wagner's
operas, is best described in the oft-quoted words of Wagner himself,
as "the fertilisation of music by poetry." He felt that there was
considerable evidence of the action of poetry upon music in
Beethoven, though, as can be seen from the passages on the
Leonora overture already quoted, in Beethoven the reins are still too
tightly clutched by absolute music. He always, no matter what the
origin of his conceptions may have been, worked them out within
the limits of symphonic form. Berlioz, roughly speaking, went the
other way, always keeping his eye fixed intently on the lines of his
poetic scheme. Wagner's criticism upon this practice of Berlioz is
interesting, even if not final. In listening to music of this kind, he
says, "it always happened that I so completely lost the musical
thread that by no manner of exertion could I re-find and knit it up
again." His point was this, to put it in words of our own: if he was
listening to a Berlioz work, he could not get complete pleasure out of
the music, as mere music, because it was not developed along
purely musical lines; the chief theme, let us say, gave him pleasure
on its first announcement, but he could not see the rationale of its
future treatment, as one can always see the rationale of the return
of the themes in a symphony. This was because the course of the
music was determined not by abstract musical intentions, but by
poetic intentions which were not made clear to him; and the result
was, as it were, that he fell between two stools. "I discovered," he
says, "that while I had lost the musical thread (i.e. the logical and
lucid play of definite motives), I now had to hold on to scenic
motives not present before my eye, nor even so much as indicated
in the programme. Indisputably these motives existed in
Shakespeare's famous balcony scene" (Wagner is speaking of
Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet); "but in that they had all been faithfully
retained, and in the exact order given them by the dramatist, lay the
great mistake of the composer." And Wagner's contention was this,
that when a composer wants to reproduce in music a certain scene
from a drama, he must not take the thing as it stands and move on
from point to point in exactly the same way as the poet did. What
was right for the poet would be wrong for the musician. He must tell
his story or paint his scene according to the laws and capacities of
music, not those of poetry; and Wagner goes on to praise Liszt for
having, by superior artistic instinct, avoided the pitfall that nearly
proved fatal to Berlioz. Liszt, instead of trying to tell us in music
precisely what the poet had already told us in verse, rethinks in
music what the poet has said, and gives it out to us as something
born of musical feeling itself.
Now we need not go into the question of how far Wagner is right in
what he says of Berlioz. This, at all events, is certain, from his own
words in praise of Liszt, that Wagner had no à priori objection to the
symphonic poem, but only to the symphonic poem when it went on
what he took to be the wrong lines. All that is needed is for the
proper compromise to be agreed upon between the poetic purpose
and the musical form. This, I think, Richard Strauss has effected,
and it would be interesting to have had Wagner's criticism of
Strauss. But since we cannot get that, we may criticise Wagner from
the standpoint of the symphonic poem.

VIII
Before doing this, however, let us briefly touch upon one or two
other main issues.
The first point I lay stress on is this, that "form" in programme music
cannot mean the same thing as form in absolute music; and for this
reason. So long as you work in one medium alone, the form is
controlled simply by the necessities and potentialities of that
medium. In a symphony or a fugue you have to consider nothing but
the nature of absolute music; in the drama, you have to worry about
no problems except those that lie in the nature of drama. But as
soon as you begin to work in a form that is a blend of the two, each
of them wants to pull the other along its own road, and a
compromise has to be arrived at. This is why it is easier to satisfy
our sense of form in a drama or a symphony than in an opera or a
symphonic poem. We see the same thing in prose literature. If you
are going to write a pure romance, concerned with nothing but
romance, your course is fairly easy. If you are going to write a
treatise on society, again, you are bound by no laws but those
pertaining to this kind of work. But if you want to combine the two—
if you want to write a novel that shall not only depict character but
also enforce a sociological lesson, as in Zola's novels or some of the
stories of the American Frank Norris, then there is a wrench between
the two tendencies. The sociology is apt to spoil the fiction, and the
fiction the sociology. So it is in poetic music; the poetry wants the
music to go its way, the music insists on the poetry going its way. In
the case of the sociological novel, what really happens is this. We
admit that Zola's Débâcle is not so artistic a piece of work as, say, R.
L. Stevenson's Prince Otto; but we make allowances; we give up a
little purely æsthetic pleasure in consideration of getting a great deal
of another kind of pleasure—that of seeing a bigger picture of a
more real life put on the canvas. If we can only get the larger
human quality in fiction by giving up a little of the æsthetic
gratification that comes from perfect form—well, being reasonable
creatures, there are times when we will cheerfully accept the
situation and make the compromise.
And so it is in poetic music. Wagner's Tannhäuser overture and the
Tristan prelude are not so satisfactory, from the point of view of pure
form, as a movement from a Beethoven symphony. We get the
repetitions of the themes determined by poetic rather than musical
necessities. Push the principle a little further, and you will get almost
no musical continuity at all, but a continuity of picture only. If we
examine the prelude to the Dream of Gerontius, we see that the
order of the themes follows a poetic or scenic purpose rather than a
musical purpose. This is legitimate so long as it does not go too far,
so long as we are not made to feel that the musical continuity is
absolutely thrown overboard to secure didactic or literary continuity.
But the broad principle is, that a piece of musical development, like
the Tristan or Gerontius prelude, that would not be altogether
satisfactory in absolute music, is quite satisfactory in poetic music. It
tells the literary story well enough, and yet does not starve our
musical sense.

IX
This brings us to a second point. We are often told that programme
music is all right if it is so conceived and so handled that it suffices
as pure music, whether we know the programme or not. And as this
seems to many people like a fair compromise, and as programme-
musicians have been ill-treated so long that some of them are
positively thrilled with gratitude now for not being kicked, there is a
tendency to accept this quasi-solution of the problem as something
like the final one. The programmist is willing to admit that a number
of themes, no matter how agreeable, do not constitute symphonic
music unless they have some emotional connection and some logical
musical development; while the absolutist graciously allows that a
concrete subject may be the basis of a symphony, if only the music
is of such a kind that it will appeal to the hearer just as much,
although he may not know what the subject is.
It is precisely against this compromise that I think we ought to
protest, for it seems to me to be based on a complete
misunderstanding of the natures of absolute and of programme
music. Not only does it ignore the difference in intellectual origin
between a phrase such as that which opens the finale of the Jupiter
symphony, and such a one as that which symbolises Till
Eulenspiegel, but it overlooks the fact that along with this difference
in the thing expressed there must necessarily go a difference in the
manner of expressing it. It is impossible to subscribe to the insidious
compromise that programme music ought to "speak for itself,"
without a knowledge of the programme being necessary. [32] We not
only need the programme—the statement of the literary or pictorial
subject of the composition—but this is at once answerable for half
our pleasure and a justification of certain peculiarities of form which
the music may now safely assume. If the shape and colour of the
themes of a piece of music, the order of their occurrence, and the
variations they undergo, are all determined by the composer having
a certain picture in his mind, it is surely necessary for us to be told
what that picture is. If it was necessary for him when he was
composing, it is necessary for us if we are to listen to the music as
he meant us to listen to it. To put a symphonic poem before us
without telling us all the composer's intentions in it, is as foolish as
to make us listen to the music of a song or an opera without hearing
the words. In the opera and the song, things go this way or that
because the poetic purpose requires it, and the justification of them
is precisely their appropriateness to the poetic purpose. Similarly,
things go this way or that in the symphonic poem because the poetic
purpose requires it; and here also we require to know what that
poetic purpose was before we can justify or condemn what the
musician has done. Let us examine a simple case, say the Romeo
and Juliet overture of Tchaikovski, and see whether this particular
work could be equally understood and appreciated, as pure music,
by the man who knows and the man who does not know the
programme.
There is not the slightest doubt that the Romeo and Juliet would
give intense pleasure to any one who simply walked
unpremeditatedly into a concert room and heard the overture
without knowing that it had a poetical basis—who listened to it, that
is, as a piece of music pure and simple in sonata form. But I
emphatically deny that this hearer would receive as much pleasure
from the work as I do, for example, knowing the poetic story to
which it is written. He might think the passage for muted strings, for
example, extremely beautiful, but he would not get from it such
delight as I, who not only feel all the musical loveliness of the
melody and the harmonies and the tone colour, but see the lovers on
the balcony and breathe the very atmosphere of Shakespeare's
scene. I am richer than my fellow by two or three emotions in a case
of this kind. My nature is stirred on two or three sides instead of only
one. I would go further, and say that not only does the auditor I
have supposed get less pleasure from the work than I, but he really
does not hear Tchaikovski's work at all. If the musician writes music
to a play and invents phrases to symbolise the characters and to
picture the events of the play, we are simply not listening to his work
at all if we listen to it in ignorance of his poetical scheme. We may
hear the music, but it is not the music he meant us to hear, or at all
events not heard as he intended us to hear it. If melody, harmony,
colour and development are all shaped and directed by certain
pictures in the musician's mind, we get no further than the mere
outside of the music, unless we also are familiar with those pictures.
Let us take another example. The reader will remember that the
overture opens with a religioso theme, in the clarinets and bassoons,
that is intended to suggest Friar Lawrence. In the ensuing scenes of
conflict between the two opposing factions, this theme appears
every now and then in the brass, sometimes in a particularly forceful
and assertive manner. The casual hearer whom I have supposed
would probably look upon this simply as a matter of counterpoint;
Tchaikovski has invented two themes, he would say, and is now
simply combining them. But here again he would be wrong. These
passages certainly give us musical pleasure, and are as certainly
meant to do so, but they are intended also to do something more.
The reappearance of the "Friar Lawrence" theme has a dramatic as
well as a musical significance. Taken as it is from the placid wood-
wind and given to the commanding brass, and made to stand out
like a warning voice through the mad riot that is going on all round
it, it tells its own tale at once to any one with a knowledge of the
subject of the overture. So again with the mournful transformation
of the love motive at the end of the overture. Tchaikovski does not
alter the melody and the harmony in this way for merely musical
reasons. He has something more in his mind than an appeal to the
abstract musical faculty; and I repeat that the hearer who is ignorant
of this something more not only gets less than the full amount of
pleasure from the work, but really does not hear the work as
Tchaikovski conceived and wrote it, and intended it to be heard. The
same argument holds good of the song. Imagine one of the most
highly and subtly expressive of modern songs—say the "O wüsst' ich
doch" or the Feldeinsamkeit of Brahms—sung to you at a concert
without your having the slightest knowledge of the words. Some
pleasure, of course, you could not help feeling in the music; but it
would be nothing compared with the sensations you would have if
you knew the words or could follow them in a programme. Then you
would find not only that certain passages that seemed to you the
least interesting before, as mere music, are poignantly expressive,
but these apparent peculiarities are justified, and indeed
necessitated, by the poetry. Now imagine that you hear the same
song three months later. You have forgotten the actual words point
by point; but you still retain the recollection of the emotional moods
they suggested; and so you are still responsive to each nuance of
expression in the music. Listening to a song under these conditions
is precisely the same as listening to a symphonic poem. In Die
Ideale, for example, Liszt divides Schiller's poem into sections of
different intensity or different timbre of feeling, and places each of
these in the score before the section of the music that illustrates it.
Die Ideale is, in fact, an extension of the song-form, in which the
words are not sung but are either suggested to us or supposed to be
known to us. But it is folly to suppose that either in the Brahms song
or Die Ideale the man who does not know the literary basis can get
the same pleasure as the man who does.
We have only to treat all other symphonic poems in the same way as
we have just treated Tchaikovski's Romeo and Juliet—to ask
ourselves what the composer meant us to hear, and how much of it
we really do hear if we do not know his poetical scheme—to see the
folly of holding up absolute music as the standard to which
programme music ought to conform. Occasionally, however, the
objection is put in the inverse way, and we are told that programme
music is absurd because it does not speak intelligibly to us, does not
carry its story written upon it so plainly that no one can mistake it.
The charge of absurdity must be really laid at the door of the
composer. The plain truth is that a composer has no right to put
before us a symphonic poem without giving us the fullest guide to
his literary plans. It would be ridiculous of Wagner or Schubert to
think their business was ended when they had simply given their
music the title of, say, The Ring of the Nibelung or The Erl-king; it is
equally ridiculous of Strauss to call a work Till Eulenspiegel or Don
Juan, and leave us to discover the rest for ourselves. If Strauss, for
example, put together the Don Juan theme (the one on the four
horns) in that particular order not merely because he liked the
sequence of sounds, but because they accurately limned the picture
of Don Juan which he had in his eye at that moment, it is folly of
him to throw it before us as a mere self-existent sequence of
sounds, and not to tell us what aspect of Don Juan it is meant to
represent.
As for "the inherent stupidity of programme music"—to which
opinion one critic was led by having, in the innocence of his heart,
thought the motive just mentioned signified one thing, while, he
afterwards discovered, it signified quite another—I would put it to
him that he is never likely to go wrong again over this phrase, and
that each time he hears Don Juan he will, to this extent, be nearer
seeing what the composer meant him to see than he ever was
before. And if he had an equal certainty of the meaning of all the
other subjects in Don Juan, would he not then be able to recreate
the whole thing in accordance with Strauss' own ideas? And would
not all difficulty then vanish, and the "inherent stupidity" seem to be
in those who cursed the form because they had not the key to the
idea? Let any one listen to Till Eulenspiegel with no more knowledge
of the composer's intentions than is given in the title, and I can
understand him failing to make head or tail of it. But let him learn by
heart the admirable German or English analyses that can now be
had in almost any programme-book, and if all does not then become
as clear to him as crystal, if then he cannot follow all the gradations
of that magical piece of story-telling—well, one can only say that
nature has deprived him of the symphonic-poem faculty, just as she
makes some people insensitive to Botticelli or Maeterlinck. He does
but throw an interesting light on his own psychology; the value of
the musical form remains unassailed.
Now why does not Strauss, or any other composer of programme
music, spare himself and us all this trouble by showing us, once for
all, the main psychological lines upon which he has built his work?
The composer himself, in fact, is the cause of all the
misunderstanding and all the æsthetic confusion. Nothing could be
clearer than the symbolism of the music in Strauss' Don Quixote,
when you know the precise intention of each variation; but the fact
that Strauss should give the clue to these in the piano duet and omit
it all from the full score shows how absurdly lax and inconsistent the
practice of these gentlemen is. Also sprach Zarathustra, again, is
quite clear, because indications are given here and there of the
precise part of Nietzsche's book with which the musician is dealing;
while Ein Heldenleben, in the absence of an official "Guide," simply
worries us by prompting futile conjectures as to the meaning of this
or that phrase. Wagner would not have dreamt of throwing a long
work before us, and simply telling us that the subject of it was
Parsifal. Why, then, should the writer of symphonic poems expect us
to fathom all his intentions when he has merely printed the title of
his work? If the words of the opera are necessary for me to
understand what was in Wagner's mind when he wrote this or that
motive, surely words—not accompanying the music, but prefixed to
it—are needful to tell me what was in Strauss' mind when he shaped
the violin solo in Ein Heldenleben. If it is absurd to play to me a song
without giving me a copy of the words, expecting me to understand
the music that has been born of a poetical idea as if it had been
written independently of any verbal suggestion, it is equally absurd
to put before me, as pure music, an orchestral piece that was never
conceived as pure music. If the poem or the picture was necessary
to the composer's imagination, it is necessary to mine; if it is not
necessary to either of us, he has no right to affix the title of it to his
work.
It is curious, again, that people who can defend Wagner as against
the absolutists cannot also see that they are implicitly justifying
Strauss and his fellows. Thus another critic writes that "Wagner saw
that the intellectual idea could not be conveyed by music alone; that
together with the colour—the music—must go the spoken word to
make clear what was meant." So far, good. But then he quarrels with
Strauss for trying to make his themes expressive of something more
than music pure and simple, and giving us a programme to help us.
Why, where in the name of lucidity is the difference between singing
to a phrase of music the words that prompted it, and printing these
words alongside the phrase or at the beginning of the score? Does it
matter whether the composer writes a love-scene and has the actual
words sung by a tenor and a soprano, or merely puts the whole
thing on an orchestra, and tells us that this is a scene between two
lovers, and that their love is of such and such a quality? For the life
of me I cannot see why the one proceeding is right and the other
wrong. And once more, if it is essential that we should not be left in
the slightest doubt in the case of the opera as to who the
protagonists are and what is the nature of their sentiments, it is
equally essential, in the case of the symphonic poem, that we should
not be left in ignorance of any of the points that have gone to make
the structure of the music what it is. No symphonic poem ought to
be published or performed without the fullest analysis of it by the
composer himself, just as he would never think of publishing the
music of his song or his opera without the words. There is no
compromise possible. If the song and the opera are legitimate
blends of literary ideas and musical expression, so is the symphonic
poem, and if the literary basis has to be given us in full in the case
of the opera, we equally need it in the other case as completely as it
can be set before us. The great trouble is that composers like
Strauss so often do neither the one thing nor the other; they neither
put their work before us as music pure and simple, nor give us
sufficient clue to what the representative music is intended to
represent.
And now let me try to show briefly that Wagner misunderstood the
meaning of his own reforms, and that the ideal poetic art-form after
which he was striving was not the opera but the symphonic poem.

X
To make the following argument clearer I will state its conclusion at
once; I am going to try to show that Wagner's own analysis of the
natures of poetry, music and drama conclusively proves that if there
can be said to be such a thing as the ideal form of art, it is not the
opera but the symphonic poem. I am not going to criticise Wagner's
theory, except for a moment here and there. I am going to accept it
broadly just as it stands, assume it to be perfectly founded on facts
and perfectly logical in the bulk of its exposition, and prove from it
that he stopped short at the final conclusion—that had he been quite
consistent to the end he would have seen, all through his own
argument, the finger of demonstration beckoning him on to a point
further than that of opera, to a point still higher up the road, where
the symphonic poem was awaiting him. And to draw this conclusion
I think we do not need to call in the aid of anything but his own
words.
In A Study of Wagner (1899) I contended that, owing to the
structure of his mind, Wagner was to a large degree insensitive to
the charms of poetry purely as poetry and of music purely as music.
He did not, that is, and could not, get from poetry or from abstract
music the precise sensations, completely satisfactory in themselves,
that a lover of poetry or a lover of abstract music would get. Poetry
to him had something unsatisfactory, imperfect, incomplete in it,
unless it reached out a hand to music; music was similarly defective
unless it was born of a poetic stimulus. To dispute this is to be blind
to the plain evidence of Wagner's prose works; the mere assertion to
the contrary of his more uncritical admirers counts for simply
nothing against the numerous passages that can be brought up in
proof. Remarks such as this, "What is not worth the being sung,
neither is it worth the poet's pain of telling," or this, "that work of
the poet's must rank as the most excellent, which in its final
consummation should become entirely music," or this, "A need in
music which poetry alone can still," or this, "If the work of the sheer
word-poet appears as a non-realised poetic aim, on the other hand,
the work of the absolute musician is only to be described as
altogether bare of such an aim; for the Feeling may well have been
entirely aroused by the purely-musical expression, but it could not
be directed," [33]—remarks such as these are not to be explained
away. Nay, Wagner's very notion of an art-work that should embrace
all the arts was a sure proof of there being a specific something in
each art to which he was impervious.
This, then, is the prime fact in Wagner's artistic psychology. When a
poetical idea occurred to him, it was one that cried out for the
emotional colour of music to complete it; when a musical idea
occurred to him, it was one controlled and directed from the start by
a poetic concept. Hence not only his dramatic work but his
theoretical work is simply the expression of this psychological bias.
His opponents did him an injustice when they said he worked out
certain theories and then wrote operas to illustrate and justify them.
The fact was that the theories and the operas were only two
branches from the same trunk—not cause and effect, but two effects
of the same cause. In the operas and the prose works alike he was
simply seeking self-expression. But muddled thinker as I hold
Wagner to have been upon most of the subjects his busy brain took
up, he was perfectly clear as to what he wanted to do in opera, and
what he wanted to say in explanation of it. Even the distressing
opacity of his style, that makes the reading of him so severe a trial
to one's literary sense, cannot prevent the big outlines of his system
standing out in perfect clearness. In that system he thought he had
demonstrated three things—(1) that at a certain stage of its
evolution poetry has to call in the aid of music in order fully to
realise its desires, (2) that music for the same reason has at a
certain stage to call in the aid of poetry, and (3) that in the musical
drama we get the best powers of music and of poetry exerted to the
fullest, and combined in a harmonious whole. (He also held that the
scene-painting, the stage-setting, and the gestures of the actors
gratified adequately our other æsthetic senses; but we need not
concern ourselves with this aspect of his theory here.)
Let me first make it quite clear that Wagner wished to get an ideal
musical-poetic art-form by shearing off from music all that did not
tend towards poetry, and from poetry all that did not tend towards
music. "Unity of artistic Form," he says in Opera and Drama, "is only
thinkable as the emanation of a united Content: a united Content,
however, we can only recognise by its being couched in an artistic
expression through which it can announce itself entirely to the
Feeling. A Content which should prescribe a twofold expression, i.e.
an expression which obliged the messenger to address himself
alternately to the Understanding and the Feeling—such a Content
could only be itself a dual, a discordant one. Every artistic aim
makes primarily for a united Shape.... Since it is the instinctive Will
of every artistic Aim to impart itself to the Feeling, it follows that the
cloven Expression is incompetent to entirely arouse the Feeling...."
"This," he goes on to say, "This entire arousing of the Feeling was
impossible to the sheer Word-poet, through his expressional organ;
therefore what he could not impart through that to Feeling, he was
obliged to announce to Understanding, so as to compass the full
utterance of the content of his Aim: he must hand over to
Understanding, to be thought out, what he could not give to be
perceived by Feeling." Thus poetry falls to the ground, as it were,
between two stools; the poet wants to make a direct appeal to
Feeling, but he is partly defeated by having to make this appeal
through the medium of words, which are more the organ of
Understanding than of Feeling. The one thing to be done, then, is to
supply this deficiency of Feeling by a resort to music, whose appeal
par excellence is to the Feeling.
But per contra, music itself, as abstract music, is incomplete;
because, although it does indeed move us, it leaves us in doubt as
to the cause and purpose of the emotion. "If the work of the sheer
Word-poet," says Wagner, "appears as a non-realised poetic Aim, on
the other hand the work of the absolute Musician is only to be
described as altogether bare of such an Aim; for the Feeling may
well have been entirely aroused by the purely-musical expression,
but it could not be directed." Or, as he phrases it in another place,
instrumental music had worked away at its regular sound-patterns
until it "had won itself an idiomatic speech—a speech which in any
higher artistic sense, however, was arbitrary and incapable of
expressing the purely-human, so long as the longing for a clear and
intelligible portrayal of definite, individual human feelings did not
become its only necessary measure for the shaping of those melodic
particles."
So much, then, is clear; according to the Wagnerian theory, mere
poetry needs music to help it to make its direct appeal to Feeling;
mere music needs the concrete suggestions of poetry to give it order
and direction. Even in the later works of Beethoven the pendulum
shifts from absolute, abstract musical tone-weaving to the effort to
say more definite things; there awoke in him, says Wagner, "a
longing for distinct expression of specific, characteristically individual
emotions," and he "began to care less and less about merely making
music." The climax of this impulse to blend musical feeling and
poetic purpose in the one art-work was, of course, to be the
Wagnerian opera or music-drama.
This line of argumentation leads to two other propositions:—
(1) In the first place, given that music and poetry are to co-operate
to make one product, and given that the most perfect art-form is
that which makes a single, undivided, undistracting appeal to us, it
follows that the more intimately the two factors are blended the
better the result will be. There must be no little bit of music that
hangs out, as it were, and declines to meet the poetry on equal
terms; there must be no little bit of poetry that refuses to be
amenable to musical expression. The compromise must be perfect;
there must be just so much poetic purpose as is necessary to keep
the musical utterance definite and unmistakable, and just so much
musical outpouring as is necessary to lift all the poetry into the ideal
realm of Feeling; just so much in each case and no more. There
must be a complete "emotionalisation of the intellect"; or, to use yet
another of Wagner's phrases, we must have "a truly unitarian" form.
And in answer to the question, "Has the poet to restrict himself in
presence of the musician, and the musician in presence of the
poet?" he says that they must not restrict each other, "but rouse
each other's powers into highest might, by love...." "... If the poet's
aim—as such—is still at hand and visible, then it has not as yet gone
under into the Musical Expression; but if the Musician's Expression—
as such—is still apparent, then it, in turn, has not yet been inspired
by the Poetic Aim." In the Zukunftsmusik he puts the same idea in
other words: the ideal text can be achieved only by "that poet who
is fully alive to Music's tendency and exhaustless faculty of
expression, and therefore drafts his poem in such a fashion that it
may penetrate the finest fibres of the musical tissue, and the spoken
thought entirely dissolve into the Feeling."
(2) In the second place, the new circumstances must sanction a new
form. What was quite right in the symphony, having regard to its
peculiar purpose, will be quite wrong in the music-drama, where the
purpose is altogether different. Nowhere, perhaps, is Wagner on
safer ground, or more illuminative in his reasoning, than he is here.
He shows how the symphony—like all purely abstract musical
utterances—must adopt certain definite formal methods of
procedure if it is to hang together at all. The growth of sonata-form
in the eighteenth century was determined not by the arbitrary
desires of individuals here and there, but by a deep underlying logic
—a logic of the emotions—that ran unconsciously through them and
through their hearers. It was this obscure, intuitive logic that made
the need felt for a second subject in contrast with the first, for an
exposition of these two subjects, for their working out, and for their
final recapitulation; it was this logic that determined the contrast of
character between the different movements. The kaleidoscope had
to be perpetually bringing the picture before us in new aspects; the
essence of dramatic working is development; the essence of "all
forms arisen from the March or Dance" is change. Thus the new
form for dramatic music must be sought in the nature of that genre,
not in the nature of a quite alien genre. In the essay On Franz Liszt's
Symphonic Poems, Wagner points out, as we have seen, how the
laws of drama and the laws of symphony are at variance. Let me
quote the gist of his remarks again. "It will be obvious that, in the
conflict of a dramatic idea with this (symphonic) form, the necessity
must at once arise to either sacrifice the development (the idea) to
the alternation (the form), or the latter to the former"; whereupon
follows the criticism of the Leonora overture which I have already
quoted. When he reaches the point that a new form would have
been necessary to allow free and consistent play to Beethoven's
ideas in the Leonora, he asks, "What, now, would that form be?" and
replies, "Of necessity a form dictated by the subject of portrayal and
its logical development."
Having briefly sketched out the two leading principles of Wagner's
theory, let us now leave the second, which is perfectly clear in itself
and in all its implications, and return to the first, the implications of
which are perhaps not quite so clear. Wagner himself held that as he
grew in artistic wisdom, his opera-poems came closer and closer to
the ideal form, in which there should be just as much music as the
poetry required, and just as much poetry as the music required. He
admitted that the poems of Rienzi, The Flying Dutchman,
Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin were not quite all they should be; they
were simply stages in his evolution. But he was willing to submit the
poem of Tristan to the severest possible test of conformity with his
ideal. "Upon that work," he says, "I consent to your making the
severest claims deducible from my theoretic premisses: not because
I formed it on any system, for every theory was clean forgotten by
me; but since here I moved with fullest freedom and the most utter
disregard of every theoretic scruple...."
What now is the great advantage, according to Wagner's theory, that
the musical dramatist has over the poet or the novelist? Simply this,
that he can discard all the more or less uninspired matter that they
require in order to make their purpose clear, and plunge at once into
the heart of his subject. Take, as an example, this very poem of
Tristan and Isolde. The poet or the novelist, before he can begin to
move you, must descend to a relatively unemotional plane in order
to acquaint your understanding with certain positive facts it is
essential it should know. He must tell you who Tristan and Isolde
were, when and where they lived, what was their relation to the
other people of the drama, and a score of other things that can
hardly be made emotional in themselves. A long poem or drama is
bound, by the nature of the case, to have a certain amount of dross
scattered about among its gold; the beautiful appeals to Feeling are
only made into a coherent story or picture by the use of this less
emotional tissue. From this difficulty the musical dramatist escapes;
in music he has a powerful engine that enables him to dispense with
all these mere wrappings of his Feeling, and reach directly and
immediately to the Feeling itself. He avoids the arbitrary, and takes
up his stand at once in the centre of the "purely human." Thus
Wagner needs no preliminary fumbling about for his tragedy; the
first bar of the overture transports you at once into the world and
the mood to which the poet must drag you through twenty
explanatory pages. "All that detailed description and exhibition of the
historico-conventional which is requisite for making us clearly
understand the events of a given, remote historical epoch, and
which the historical novelist or dramatist of our times has therefore
to set forth at such exhaustive length—all this I could pass over." He
concerns himself not with historical subjects but with the simple
myth or legend, for "the legend, in whatever age or nation it occurs,
has the merit of seeing nothing but the purely human content of
that age and nation, and of giving forth that Content in a form
peculiar to itself, of sharpest outline, and therefore swiftly
understandable." The musician, in fact, must discard everything but
the purely human; he must take a poetical subject of which this is
the core, and then kindle it into incandescence by means of music.