is idealized, in its whole rise and fall, within a space of five
minutes. Wagner’s task is to select five real minutes near the
end of the storm and to treat them with no greater variety than
the action of the drama demands. When we have learnt to
dissociate our minds from irrelevant ideas of an earlier instrumental
art, we find that Wagner’s broad spaces contain all that
is necessary. Art on a large scale will always seem to have
empty spaces, so long as we expect to find in it the kind of detail
appropriate to art on a smaller scale.
Wagner’s new harmonic resources are of similar and more complex but not less legitimate origin. In Der fliegende Holländer they are, like his wider rhythmic sweep, imperfectly digested; in fact, much of his work before the Meistersinger is, in patches, debased by the influence of Meyerbeer. But in his later works the more closely his harmonic language is studied the more conclusively does it show itself to be a logical and mastered thing. His treatment of key is, of course, adapted to a state of things in which the designs are far too long for the mind to attach any importance to the works ending in the key in which it began. To compare Wagner’s key-system with that of a symphony is like comparing the perspective and composition of a panorama with the perspective and composition of an easel picture. Indeed the differences are precisely analogous in the two cases; and Wagner’s sense of harmony and key turns out on investigation to be the classical sense truly adapted to its new conditions. For this very reason it is in detail quite irrelevant to symphonic art; and there was nothing anti-Wagnerian in the reasons why Brahms had so little to do with it in his music, although every circumstance of the personal controversies and thinly disguised persecutions of Brahms’s youth were enough to give any upholder of classical symphonic art a rooted prejudice to everything bearing the name of “romantic.”
Side by side with Wagner many enthusiasts place Liszt; and it is indisputable that Liszt had in mind a larger and slower flow of musical sequence closely akin to Wagner’s, and, no doubt, partly independent of it; and moreover, that one of Liszt’s aims was to apply this to instrumental music. Also his mastery and poetic power as a pianoforte player were faithfully reflected in his later treatment of the orchestra, and ensured an extraordinary rhetorical plausibility for anything he chose to say. But neither the princely magnanimity of his personal character, which showed itself in his generosity alike to struggling artists and to his opponents, nor the great stimulus he gave (both by his compositions and his unceasing personal efforts and encouragement) to new musical ideas on romantic lines, ought at this time of day to blind us to the hollowness and essential vulgarity of his style. These unfortunate qualities did not secure for his compositions immediate popular acceptance; for they were outweighed by the true novelty of his aims. But recently they have given his symphonic poems an attractiveness which, while it has galvanized a belated interest in those works, has made many critics blind to their historical importance as the foundation of new forms which have undergone a development of sensational brilliance under Richard Strauss.
Meanwhile the party politics of modern music did much to distract public attention from the works of Brahms, who carried on the true classical method of the sonata-forms in his orchestral and chamber music, while he was no less great and original as a writer of songs and choral music of all kinds. He also developed the pianoforte lyric and widened its range. Without losing its characteristic unity it assumed a freedom and largeness of expression hitherto only attained in sonatas. Hence, however, Brahms’s work, like Bach’s, seemed, from its continuity with the classical forms, to look backward rather than forward. Indeed Brahms’s reputation is in many quarters that of an academic reactionary; just as Bach’s was, even at a time when the word “academic” was held to be rather a title of honour than of reproach. When the contemporary standpoints of criticism are established by the production of works of art in which the new elements shall no longer be at war with one another and with the whole, perhaps it will be recognized once more that the idea of progress has no value as a critical standard unless it is strictly applied to that principle by which every work of art must differ in every part of its form from every other work, precisely as far as its material differs and no further. Then, perhaps, as the conservative Bach after a hundred years of neglect revealed himself as the most profoundly modern force in the music of the 19th century, while that of his gifted and progressive sons became a forgotten fashion as soon as their goal was attained by greater masters, so may the musical epoch that seems now to have closed be remembered by posterity as the age, not of Wagner and the pioneer Liszt, but the age of Wagner and Brahms.
It will also in all probability be remembered as the age in which the performer ceased to be necessarily the intellectual inferior of the composer and musical scholar. With the exception of Wagner and Berlioz every great composer, since Palestrina sang in the papal choir, has paid his way as a performer; but Joseph Joachim was the first who threw the whole mind of a great composer into the career of an interpreter; and the example set by him, Bülow, Clara Schumann and Jenny Lind, though followed by very few other artists, sufficed to dispel for ever the old association of the musical performer with the mountebank.
Joachim’s influence on Brahms was incalculable. The two composers met at the time when new musical tendencies were beginning to arouse violent controversy. At the age of twenty-one Joachim had produced in his Hungarian Concerto a work of high classical mastery and great nobility, and his technique in form and texture was then considerably in advance of Brahms’s. For some years Joachim and Brahms interchanged contrapuntal exercises, and many of the greatest and most perfect of Brahms’s earlier works owe much to Joachim’s criticism. Yet it is impossible to regret that Joachim did not himself carry on as a composer the work he so nobly began, when we realize the enormous influence of his playing in the history of modern music. By it we have become familiar with a standard of truthfulness in performance which all the generous efforts of Wagner and Liszt could hardly have rendered independent of their own special propaganda. And by it the record of classical music has been made a matter of genuine public knowledge, with a unique freedom from those popularizing tendencies which invest vulgar error with the authority of academic truth.
In this respect there is a real change in the nature of modern musical culture. No serious composer at the present day would dedicate a great work to an artist who, like F. Clément, for whom Beethoven wrote his Violin Concerto, would perform the work in two portions and between them play a sonata for the violin on one string with the violin upside down. But it is hardly true that Wagner and Liszt produced a real alteration in the standard of general culture among musicians. Their work, especially Wagner’s, appealed, like Gluck’s, to many specific literary and philosophical interests, and they themselves were brilliant talkers; but music will always remain the most self-centred of the arts, and men of true culture will measure the depth and range of the musician’s mind by the spontaneity and truthfulness of his musical expression rather than by his volubility on other subjects. The greatest musicians have not often been masters of more than one language; but they have always been men of true culture. Their humanity has been illuminated by the constant presence of ideals which their artistic mastery keeps in touch with reality.
Chronological Table
Pythagoras, c. 582–500 B.C. Determines the ratios of the diatonic scale.
Aristoxenus, fl. 320 B.C. Our chief authority on classical Greek music.
St Ambrose. Arranges the Ambrosian tones of church music, A.D. 384.
