Chapter III: Part 3

Brangäne is not heroic. There is not a line in Wagner's text to justify such a conception of the character. Wagner's Brangäne is a maid, a serving-woman. She is simple-minded, even innocent. In some respects she is foolish. Her one dominating note is devotion to her mistress. She is doglike in nature. She is Isolde's feminine Kurvenal. But she lacks in every essential the emotional and intellectual initiative of Tristan's esquire. She is passive. She is necessarily thus. From the point of view of dramatic character construction she must be so in order to afford an effective foil to Isolde, with whom she is continually placed in contrast. In more subtle but none the less influential opposition does she stand to Kurvenal, the embodiment of active, working devotion to the master. Brangäne does nothing but what she is bid, and does that wrong.

Her simple-minded innocence leads her to become what the dramatist needs to complete his scheme, an unconscious agent of fate. Acting wholly under the influence of devotion to her mistress, and without sufficient wisdom to foresee the terrible consequences of her deed, she administers to the lovers the potion which drowns their self-control and plunges them into the sea of passion. She does this on the unthinking impulse of the moment, solely because she is frightened out of such wits as she has by her mistress's determination to share with Tristan the drink of death.

Is that a heroic act? Would not a heroic nature have grasped the significance of the moment, and, foreseeing the approaching shame, have acquiesced in Isolde's decision? Nay, more; filled with such devotion as that of Brangäne, raised to a divine ecstasy by innate heroism, she would have swallowed her share of the poison and laid her down at her lady's feet to die, as Kurvenal did at Tristan's.

But there is not a single element of the heroic in Brangäne. She is, if anything, a coward, or at least a temporizer. The makeshift of the moment is what appears most desirable to her. Her naïve mind, which was so astonished to learn that the Tantris she helped to nurse was the Tristan she had just addressed, could project itself into the future no further than the next quarter of an hour. If that chanced to be a bad one, no matter. Those which were to follow were all blank for the good Brangäne.

So must it be, for in all versions of the story except that mysterious one which Scribe unearthed for use in Auber's "Le Philtre," and which reappears in the first act of Donizetti's "L'Elisir d'Amore," the potion is taken by the two lovers unwittingly. It is administered by mistake. Wagner has accentuated his meaning as to the character of Brangäne by modifying this feature of the legend. His Brangäne does not give the love potion by mere mistake, but in order to save her lady's life. To enact her as a heroic personage makes her exchange of the potions inexplicable. Yet Wagner did not wholly abandon the notion of a mistake, for Brangäne's error in preferring Isolde's dishonor to her death is surely a mistake of the direst kind.

In the poem of Gottfried von Strassbourg--here let us fall into the widening trail of the historic exploration party--Brangäne does not give the potion at all. Neither is she a maid. She is a lady of high position at the court of Isolde's mother and in the confidence of the Queen. This Queen is a magician and gives the love potion to Brangäne to administer to Isolde and King Mark as soon as they are wed. On the voyage, Tristan, desiring wine, calls for it, and a maid attending the Princess brings to him the phial containing the potion. It looks like wine, and neither Tristan nor the maid suspects that it is anything else. Isolde, too, knows naught of it. Then, says Gottfried:--

"To Tristan first she passed the same:
He gave it to the royal dame.
Thereof she drank reluctantly,
Gave it to him, and then drank he;
That wine it was they both believed.
Then came Brangäne, who perceived
And recognized at once the glass;
She well saw what had come to pass.
Thereon she felt such dire dismay
That all her strength was giving way,
And she appeared as are the dead;
Her heart was filled with mortal dread.
She seized the baleful glass she knew,
And bore it hence away and threw
It in the wildly raging sea.
'Oh, woe!' she spoke, 'Oh, woe is me,
That in this world I e'er was born,
I wretched one! Now I am shorn
Of troth and honor which were mine.
Have pity on me, Lord divine;
Oh, that I came unto this shore
And death took me not hence before--
That with Isold my lot was e'er
This fatal enterprise to share!
Oh, woe, Isold! Woe, Tristan, too!
This draught is death to both of you.'"

This Brangäne afterward explains to these two sudden lovers what has happened to them, and reiterates that the draught will be their death. Tristan declares that he will die happy possessing Isolde's love. But it is unnecessary to pursue the original legend further. Enough has been given to show that the Brangäne of Gottfried is not the Brangäne of Wagner.

Again we meet with one of those effective modifications of the old stories which Wagner made in his dramas. The splendid figure of the Queen mother's confidante bewailing her momentary unwatchfulness and her loss of honor, ready for the sake of that betrayal of confidence to give up her now wretched life, is a vastly different creature from the Brangäne of Wagner, who administers the potion as the shortest way out of an impending trouble.

Again, remember that this deed is one of pure unthinking devotion to the mistress. The fatal drink is the visible embodiment of fate. Appearing as it does in inanimate form, it needs an agent to convey it to the four lips of the lovers. That agent is found in the foolish, doting maid. Is it not a purely Wagnerian touch?

Even Swinburne, poet of far higher fancy than Wagner, did not think of such a plan. He improves on the old legend by making Isolde herself administer the potion in error:--

"Iseult sought and would not wake Brangwain,
Who slept as one half dead with fear and pain,
Being tender natured; so with hushed light feet
Went Iseult round her, with soft looks and sweet
Pitying her pain; so sweet a spirited thing
She was, and daughter of a kindly king.
And spying what strange bright secret charge was kept
Fair in that maid's white bosom while she slept,
She sought and drew the gold cup forth and smiled,
Marvelling, with such light wonder as a child
That hears of glad, sad life in magic lands;
And bear it back to Tristram with pure hands
Holding the love draught that should be for flame
To burn out of them fear and faith and shame."

Iseult speaks merrily of the wile of Brangwain in concealing this, the best wine of the feast. Then they drink, and the world is made anew. Here again the agency for the supply of the potion is error. Wagner could not have built his tragedy on such mighty lines if he had left that thought out. His Tristan and Isolde were standing on the brink of a volcanic crater; something was needed to impel them into it. That something was found in the foolish love of the simple-minded Brangäne.

The first act of Wagner's tragedy tells all that is to be told of the serving-woman. She stands disclosed at the very outset as a sublimated comprimaria. She is the titanic Alice to this mighty Lucia, marching to her marriage with one man when she loves another. To this Alice this Lucia tells how she learned to love in days now buried in the sweet and unforgotten past. The comprimaria of the old Italian opera walked about with the prima donna and gave her cues. This new comprimaria follows the same lines, but in how different a manner! Wagner was indeed the regenerator of the lyric drama. Verdi knew it. His Emilia would have been an old-fashioned comprimaria had he written "Otello" in his "Traviata" days.

First, this maid, alarmed at Isolde's passionate prayer that the ship and all in it may be destroyed ere they reach Mark's land, asks what has caused her mistress to be so downcast throughout the voyage. Then she is amazed to learn that Tantris is Tristan, and that her mistress does not wish to be led by him to the couch of Mark. She even offers some cheap, prosaic, and senseless worldly counsel. "If Tristan is under any obligation to you, how can he discharge it better than by making you Mark's queen? Even if he himself did the wooing for his uncle, why should you object? He's a gentleman of rank and reputation." This innocent maid does not even catch the tragic meaning of Isolde's

"Ungeminnt
Den hehrsten Mann
Stets mir nah' zu sehen--
Wie konnt' ich die Qual bestehen?"

"Unloved by the lordliest man, yet always near him, how could I bear that anguish?" This "heroic" Brangäne applies this speech to King Mark and reminds Isolde of the casket of enchanted drinks provided by her mother. When Isolde proclaims that the drink of death is that which she will use, the situation is entirely beyond the comprehension of the maid. She cries: "The drink, for whom? Tristan? Oh, horror!"

The score is significantly barren of explicit stage directions about the substitution of the potion of love for that of death. But there is no question as to what ought to be done. Wagner on more than one occasion fell into the error of leaving too much to the imagination of the public. It is absolutely essential to the understanding of "Tristan und Isolde" by an audience that Brangäne should with the greatest possible clearness exhibit the exchange of the drinks. She should show convincingly, by facial expression and gesture, the sudden formation of the idea of the substitution, and she should be particular to force the act of exchange upon the attention of the audience. Otherwise the subsequent actions of the two lovers are inexplicable to many, for the common experience of the theatre teaches that the points of a drama must be not merely indicated, but driven home; and the whole tragedy of "Tristan und Isolde" rests upon the love potion.

The potion once swallowed, Brangäne, who, "confused and shuddering," has been leaning over the ship's rail, turns and bursts out with a cry: "Woe, woe! Unpreventable endless trouble instead of brief death!"

This wise and heroic Brangäne, seeing the bride of Mark in the arms of Tristan, and knowing that they are the victims of her temporizing policy, bewails what she has done and suddenly discovers that death would have been better. The English translations do not bring this passage out clearly, yet it is of vital importance in explaining the character of Isolde's maid.

In the second act Brangäne is shown to us the victim of her own ceaseless terrors. Day and night she cowers under the shadow of the impending axe. Her mind being stimulated by her fears for her mistress and her own remorse, she plays the spy and tracks the traitor Melot to his lair.

But all in vain. The barriers are burned away. The blood of Isolde is become as lava in her veins. She knows naught in all the world but the mad delirium of passion. Isolde will extinguish the torch. Brangäne pleads, and cries: "Oh that I had not once been faithless and false to my mistress's will! If I had only remained dumb and blind, _thy_ work had been death! Now, as it is, thy shame, thy most shameful trouble, _my_ work,--thus must I, blameworthy, know it."

Not very heroic that! Brangäne wishes she had kept out of the whole affair. Then the death of Tristan and Isolde would have been the latter's act. Now this poor maid feels that her policy of temporizing has caused all the trouble and brought her beloved mistress into a shameful position. That is practically all of Brangäne.

One little speech in the third act shows that she is still reproaching herself for her weakness. She has gone to the King and atoned for her "blind guilt," as she calls it, by explaining to him the cause of the loss of honor by Tristan and Isolde.

In the entire text of Wagner there is nothing to indicate that he intended Brangäne to be regarded as anything but a simple-minded serving-woman, deeply attached to her mistress, acting in the matter of the potions on a blind and instantaneous impulse to save her mistress from death and murder. She is naïve in thought, superficial in reasoning, straightforward in emotion, and altogether transparent as crystal. Kurvenal's devotion to Tristan is essentially a masculine devotion, ready to face death, deploring dishonor, but not forsaking even in the face of shame. Kurvenal serves with heart and life. Brangäne serves with heart and subterfuge.

A vast amount of ill-informed feminine twitter is accepted as learned comment on such characters as Brangäne. All that is necessary to a full understanding of this or any other Wagnerian personage is a careful examination of the text and music. The text should always be the original German, for the libretto translators have played havoc with it. Brangäne's most significant wail, "Unpreventable endless trouble instead of quick death," is usually translated in a misleading manner.

RICHARD STRAUSS

I. THE HISTORICAL SURVEY

Theorbos, violins, French horns, guitars,
Leave in my wounded ears inflicted scars.

CHARLES LAMB to _Clara N._

For some seasons the orchestral compositions of Richard Strauss have been the exciting features of the leading orchestral concerts. They have fairly set the musical _cognoscenti_ by the ears. The strenuous German artist is yet a young man, and what he may achieve in an uncertain future is a fruitful subject for critical speculation. What he has already done is to stir up the musical world as it has not been stirred since Richard Wagner proclaimed his regenerative theories of the musical drama. Strauss has turned the technic of orchestral composition topsy-turvy, and has made orchestras sing new songs. He has in certain ways discredited Beethoven and the prophets, and has shrunk the orchestral wonders of Berlioz and Wagner to the dimensions of a Sunday afternoon band concert. He has caused the critical heathen to rage and the long-haired people to imagine vain things. In fine, the simple question now frankly discussed in the sacred circles of the inner brotherhood is just this: "Is Richard Strauss a heaven-born genius, or is he merely crazy?"

Usually when musical composers have ventured out of the beaten path, just found by the critics after much thorny wandering through the jungle of error, the cry has been that they were going astray. The poor critics have never been able to understand how any genius could depart from the beaten path without being lost in the woods, as they themselves generally are. In nine cases out of ten the composer who does so depart is lost, and hence the critic's calling is not altogether one of sorrow. The prophet who has ninety per cent of "I told you so" in his retrospective views is not wholly a subject for commiseration. But there is that tenth man, who is always an explorer, and who always sets to cutting new paths through the forest. The critic says, "You're going to get lost," and he replies, "I may lose you, but not myself." After a time he comes out of the forest into a new and beautiful land, and the critic, limping slowly and painfully after him, murmurs, "You were right: it is good for us to be here."

And so the music critics, who long ago reduced their comments on Beethoven and Weber and Schubert and Schumann to an exact science, and who have made it possible for any old reader to predict precisely what will be said on the morning after a purely classical concert, have fallen over the music of Strauss into a confusion like unto that of the army of Pharaoh suddenly overtaken by the waters of the Red Sea. It was about twelve years ago that this music began to echo through the concert-rooms of America. Strauss had begun to write early in life, but his first works were imitative of the older masters. The real Richard Strauss began to reveal himself in 1887, when he produced "Macbeth," the first of his series of symphonic poems. The others are Don Juan (1888), Death and Apotheosis (1889), Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks (1895), Thus Spake Zarathustra (1896), Don Quixote (1897), and A Hero's Life (1898). The "Symphonia Domestica," which is really a tone poem, was produced at Carnegie Hall, New York, March 21, 1904.

What has Strauss done in these works to "so get the start of the majestic world"? He has asked us to listen to orchestral compositions made with wide deviations from the established outlines, with a new melodic idiom, with a harmony which frequently affects the ear precisely as lemon juice affects the palate, with instrumental combinations of overpowering sonority and harshness, and, above all, with attempts at a detailed definiteness of expression which demand the closest application of the hearer's powers of analysis.

He has excited curiosity of the liveliest kind among those who hold that there is a real difference "'twixt tweedledum and tweedledee." To those who accept music, as they accept soup, as one of the conventional details of a polite existence, all this pother about Strauss must seem unnecessary, yet since it has come, they naturally desire to know what it is all about. They must, then, begin by recognizing the fact that the modern orchestra has developed from a collection of ill-assorted and misunderstood instruments into a single instrument, the most eloquent at the disposal of the composer. It is majestic in power, royal in dignity, brilliant in gayety, convulsing in sport, inspiring in appeal, melting in supplication. Its variety of tonal shades is exhaustless. Its scale ranges from the profoundest bass to the acutest treble. Its dynamic power modulates from the faintest whisper of a pianissimo to the thunderous crash of a fortissimo. It sings, it laughs, it weeps, it woos, it storms, it hymns, it meditates,--all at the command of the composer who knows how to utilize its powers.

Yet it is still an imperfectly understood instrument. Remember always that music is the youngest of our modern arts. Remember, too, that although we can trace its beginnings back to the fourth century of the Christian era, we find that twelve hundred years were occupied with the development of a single form of music,--vocal polyphony, the form in which the mighty masterpieces of the Roman Church down to the day of Lasso and Palestrina were composed. The masters of this vocal polyphony were engaged in studying how they could compose for the liturgy of the church music in which several voice-parts, each singing a melody, could sound simultaneously and yet produce agreeable harmonies. The discovery of the principles underlying this method was made slowly, yet it was essential that this discovery should be made. Without it musical art could not advance, for the laws of counterpoint and harmony are the first principles of musical art.

Toward the close of the sixteenth century a change came over the spirit of music. The mass of the Roman Church had become so complicated and ornate in its style of composition that the congregations did not know what words of the liturgy were sung. The revival of Greek learning in Italy brought with it the study of the Greek Testament in the original, and this study revealed the defects of the Vulgate used by the church. A blow at Latin was a blow at the authority of the church, and the questionings aroused by the revelations of the Greek Testament touched the mass, and made the people desirous of hearing the text and knowing what it was about. Such a demand called for a simplification of musical style. This demand was strengthened by the invention of printing. The people began to get books and to read, and that led them to think and inquire. Furthermore the chaste beauty of Greek art had become known, and its influence promoted the simplification of musical style in the church. The broad and dignified hymns employed by the great reformer, Martin Luther, were another powerful argument in favor of simpler music in the sanctuary. The church was not blind to the signs of the time, and its composers made some efforts toward clarifying their style.

The revival of Greek learning led also to an attempt to resuscitate the dead Greek drama, or rather to reconstruct the Italian play on its lines. The fact that the Greeks had chanted rather than declaimed their dramatic texts suggested to the little band of Italian enthusiasts led by Galilei, Peri, and Caccini, an attempt to reproduce this musical delivery. Their efforts resulted in the invention of dramatic recitative and the birth of opera. With the advent of this form of vocal art the supremacy of church polyphony was overthrown. It did not cease to exist, but it lost its dominion over the musical world, and it almost stopped developing. To this day the works of Palestrina composed in the second half of the sixteenth century remain the model and the despair of church composers. Handel and Bach, introducing more modern harmonies and employing the resources of the orchestra, which Palestrina and his predecessors never used, carried vocal polyphony a little further, but their advance was external rather than fundamental.

It was at this stage of musical progress that the orchestra made its appearance,--a feeble, tottering, purposeless instrumental infant. Collections of instruments had of course existed. Millionaires of the Middle Ages drowned the inanities of their dinner conversation with banquet music, just as the moderns do. But their assemblies of instruments were merely fortuitous. Any instruments which chanced to be in the house, and for which there were players, were utilized. There was no music specially written for these orchestras. We may suppose that they played the popular tunes of the day. When the opera came into existence, some sort of orchestra had to be extemporized. Here again in the beginning any instruments easily accessible seem to have been taken up. It was not till Claudio Monteverde began his experiments in instrumental combinations in his operas in the early part of the seventeenth century that anything like method in instrumentation was discernible.

Monteverde began the exploration of the resources of each instrument in characteristic expression. He endeavored to measure the powers of the viol, the trumpet, the organ, and certain combinations of instruments as illustrators of dramatic action. He invented some of the now familiar tricks of orchestration, such as the tremolo and the pizzicato. Furthermore he created an instrumental figure to imitate the galloping of horses and another to depict the struggle of a combat, and thus was really the artistic progenitor of Richard Strauss, with his battle dins and his pirouetting maids. Succeeding composers were not slow to follow the suggestions offered by the work of Monteverde. The opera became a field for instrumental experiment, and the orchestra, as employed by the operatic composers, was continually in advance of the symphonic orchestra in the variety and extent of its combinations and in the utilization of the special powers of each individual instrument. This continued to be the case up to the time of Liszt, Berlioz, and Wagner, when the technics of conventional orchestration were so thoroughly established that the demands of the new romantic school of composers affected the orchestra simultaneously in opera and symphonic composition.

That the operatic orchestra should have taken the lead was perfectly natural. When vocal polyphony was deposed from its supremacy, instrumental music was in its infancy. Only the organ had achieved anything approaching independence, and that was because all the leading composers had been writing for the church and knew the church instrument. For practice at home they used the clavichord, one of the forerunners of the piano, and they began presently to compose special music for it, but in the style of their organ music. Gradually they fell into the way of writing for small groups of instruments, and after a time the orchestra found its way from the opera house to the church, and the orchestrally accompanied mass came into existence. But meanwhile the composers who wrote for the clavier, with the aid of those who wrote for the solo violin, were fashioning a form, and after a time the sonata began to assume a definite shape. Now it was borne in upon composers that their auditors would not arrive at the opera in time to hear the overture, for operatic publics were much the same then as they are now; and the poor composers had recourse to writing their overtures so that they could be played independently and having them performed at concerts. As these overtures were written in a form founded upon the principles of the sonata form, nothing was more natural than that gradually composers should be led to the composition of complete sonatas for orchestra, and a sonata for orchestra is a symphony.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, then, after Sebastian Bach had carried the piano solo through the splendors of his "Well Tempered Clavichord," and the piano sonata had attained something like defined shape, we see Stammitz, Gossec, and, at length, Haydn producing thin, tentative weakly orchestrated sonatas for orchestra, and the real development of independent orchestral composition began. This was nearly a century and a half after the birth of the orchestra as an adjunct to the opera, and the same length of time after the beginning of independent composition for the clavichord. In other words, although the modern art of music may fairly be said to have begun at least as early as the beginning of the twelfth century, when the fundamental principles of counterpoint were enunciated by the French masters, the most splendid and powerful of all musical instruments, the orchestra, is to-day in its infancy. For if the masters of vocal polyphony took some twelve centuries to elaborate their science, it is fair to presume that, even though the general laws of music are now firmly established, the technics of the orchestra and of orchestral composition, which are a little over a hundred years old, are yet by no means fully understood.

The method of composition employed by the early masters of orchestral music was elaborate, yet not recondite. It was a system of architecture in tones, and its achievements were distinctly satisfying to the æsthetic discernment and to the appetite of the human mind for a logical arrangement of ideas. Four parts or movements were allotted to a symphonic work. Contrast of time, rhythm, key, and harmonic color was sought. Each movement differed from that next to it. Variety in unity was the ultimate object. But each movement had to have a well-defined shape within itself. Two melodic ideas, complementary to each other in key, rhythmic nature, and sentiment, were invented. They were held up for the inspection of the hearer at the beginning of the movement Then the composer embarked upon what was called the "working out." He took the essential features of his two melodies and juggled them through the tricks of musical metamorphosis. He dressed them in new harmonies; he made them writhe in the embraces of counterpoint; he expanded them into new melodies; he sang them with the different voices of the instrumental body. In the end he repeated them in their original shape, and brought his movement to a close. The entire purpose was the treatment of themes. The only aim was to make symmetrical, intelligible, interesting music.

In evolving this form the composers fell, as I have said, into a conventional use of their orchestra. They had three choirs, one of wooden wind instruments, one of brass, and one of strings played with bows. They allotted fixed functions to each choir and to the members of each, and there they stopped. Occasionally a hint from the operatic treatment of the instruments enlightened them and they made a slight advance, but nevertheless, when Beethoven came to write his symphonies, in which he attempted to make orchestral music attain something more than mere musical beauty, he found himself hampered by the conventionalities of symphonic orchestration, as well as by those of the symphonic form. It was the limitation of the form, indeed, which restrained the instrumentation. The form itself had first reached definiteness with Haydn, who died when Beethoven was thirty-nine. Only in his later years did Haydn learn the use of clarinets, the most important members of the wood wind choir.

Beethoven, striving to make the symphony a vehicle for emotional expression, was compelled to busy himself with changes in the form, and he gave no special study to instrumental effects. He used such new ones as readily suggested themselves to him, but they were nothing more than elaborations of the old conventions. However, the seed sown by Beethoven speedily bloomed in the growth of the new romantic school. The principal tenet of this school was that music must express emotions, and that the form must develop entirely from the emotional purpose and plan of the work. Two distinguished explorers of this new style devoted their highest efforts to the production of orchestral composition.

Liszt endeavored to tell stories in music by erasing the dividing line between movements and writing his work all in one piece. He retained the two contrasting themes of the old symphonists, but he asked his hearers to affix a meaning to each of them. Then he proceeded to handle them in much the same way as the symphonists did, working them out, and varying them with much skill, though always with a view to suggesting the development of the incidents of his story. To such a purpose the resources of orchestral color lent mighty aid, and Liszt was not slow to perceive this. He began to draw away from the conventions of the symphonists, and to seek for new and striking instrumental combinations. Nevertheless in his compositions for orchestra Liszt was the debtor of two men much more remarkable than himself, namely, Wagner and Berlioz. From the former he got the idea of the use of themes with definite meanings attached to them. From the latter he obtained the suggestion of the employment of the orchestra to tell stories and much information as to its technics. Berlioz, however, continued the use of separate movements, and his attempts to use definitely representative themes were few and uncertain. He preceded Wagner, nevertheless, in the revelation of the resources of the orchestra, and he antedated Liszt in the use of the orchestra for romantic composition.

Later imitators of Berlioz and Liszt failed to perceive anything except the vast color schemes of their orchestration. Borrowing a few of the conventional figures of the older writers, such as Haydn's sea waves and Beethoven's thunder-storms, they asked us to see things through a kaleidoscope of instrumental color. They forgot that we could not understand them when they made no logical appeal to our intelligence.

Richard Strauss, standing upon the vantage ground made for him by Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner, has evidently tried to carry the direct expression of the orchestra to a higher plane by utilizing the best elements of their work. He has sought to make the orchestra tell stories, but he has not made the error of supposing that he could ignore the fundamental principles of musical form which constituted the ground plan of the old symphony. He has utilized themes with definite meanings attached to them, as Wagner did, without confining himself to two, as the older writers did, and as Liszt did in most of his works. He has returned in his later compositions to the fashion of clearly separated movements, while he has made them pass before the hearer without pauses between any two of them. He has developed his themes according to the principles laid down by the symphonic masters, and has striven to enforce their meaning with all the effects of orchestral color. And withal he has endeavored to compose only music with a purpose, never music for its own sake. In short, Strauss has shown that the principles of musical form which the earlier writers painfully evolved out of their attempts to produce nothing beyond musical beauty, not only can be, but must be, utilized by the composer who cares nothing whatever about musical beauty, and who aims only at making music a means of expression.

This I believe to be Strauss's greatest and most significant achievement. It is the legacy which he will leave to his successors, and which will influence the progress of musical development. His handling of the orchestra itself is a natural outgrowth of the researches of Berlioz and Wagner. The former left little to be learned about the capacity of each individual instrument; the latter developed to an extraordinary degree the employment of many voice-parts and the use of striking combinations. The early writers, for example, used violins always in two parts, whereas Wagner divided them sometimes into as many as fifteen. Flutes, oboes, and clarinets were used by the classic masters in pairs; Wagner began to employ them by threes. Strauss uses three or four of each. He makes his orchestra sing in many parts, and he keeps the various voices weaving and interweaving in marvellously learned counterpoint. When he wants a great climax of sound, he gets one that is overwhelming. Furthermore, he habitually introduces solo voices among the mass of tone. He individualizes his instruments, and in some compositions fairly casts them for definite dramatic impersonations. Musicians will understand me when I add that he has asked every orchestral player to be a virtuoso. He writes formidably difficult passages for horns, for trombones, for oboes. He makes no concessions to the technical difficulties of the instruments, as the older writers did. He treats the instruments, as Wagner treated human voices, simply as means of expression. The players must master the difficulties.

The critical quarrel with Strauss is based upon three grounds: first, that he endeavors to make music tell a complete story; second, that he seeks materials which are unsuited to musical embodiment; and, third, that he writes ugly music. Composers have yielded to the temptations of their fancies since the earliest days. Away back in the fifteenth century, Jannequin tried to describe The Cries of Paris in four-part vocal polyphony. Later composers fashioned piano pieces which were supposed to tell whole histories. Ambros, the distinguished German historian of music, felt it incumbent on him to write a book to show where the communicative power of music ended and the aid of text must be called in. Wagner declared that music unassisted could go no further than Beethoven's symphonies, and that the last movement of the Ninth Symphony was a confession of that fact.

It was long ago conceded that music could depict the broader emotions. It has generally been denied that it could go into details or explain to the hearer the causes of the feelings which it expressed. Yet by the judicious use of titles and the establishment of a connection between a composition and some well-known drama or poem, the imagination of the hearer is stimulated to conceive the meaning of many details otherwise incomprehensible. Strauss goes the furthest in the elaboration of detail. He uses numerous themes, each a guiding motive in the Wagnerian sense, and he asks us to follow them through a myriad of musical workings out, all having direct significance in telling a story. The stories are not without unpleasant incidents and the music is rasping in its ugliness at times. But this is not for us to judge. What is said of the music of Strauss now was said twenty-five years ago of Wagner's. But a few years, and the acidulated croakings of the singer of Munich may be as sweet upon our ears as now are the endless melodic weavings of "Tristan und Isolde."

Of the ideas which lie behind the music of Strauss less can be said in opposition now than could be said five years ago. Then we knew Strauss as the writer of "Don Juan," an attempt to put into music the sensuality of a libertine, his final satiety, his utter coldness of heart; of "Death and Apotheosis," a weird endeavor to portray with an orchestra the horrors of dissolution, the gasps, the struggles, the death-rattle, the _tremor mortis_; "Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks," a study in musical depiction of wandering vulgarity, of jocular obscenity, a vast and coruscating jumble of instrumental cackles about things unfit to be mentioned. We felt that the nineteenth century was closing with something like midsummer madness in art. With Ibsens, Maeterlincks, and Strausses plucking like soulless ghouls upon the snapping heart-strings of humanity, treating the heart as a monochord for the scientific measurement of intervals of pain, and finally poking with their skeleton fingers in the ashes of the tomb to see if they could not find a single smouldering ember of human agony, we had attained a rare state of morbidity in art. We felt that when Art had turned for her inspiration to the asylum, the brothel, and the pesthouse, it was time for a new renaissance. Strauss was our musical Maeterlinck, our tonal Ibsen. Vague, indefinable fancies, grotesque and monstrous mysticisms, gaunt shapes and shapeless horrors, seemed to be his substitutes for clean, strong, pure ideals; and when he set to music Friedrich Nietzsche's "Thus Spake Zarathustra," the philosophy of the solution of "world riddles," we thought he had utterly gone mad. For in this work we found the highest skill in the development and polyphonic treatment of leading motives devoted to an attempt to make music lecture on metaphysics, when all the time it was perfectly obvious that without reading Nietzsche's book no one could have any notion of the composer's intent. The mastery of orchestration and of the technics of composition shown in this work convinced thoughtful critics that Strauss was not to be sniffed out of consideration. Here was a force to be reckoned with in musical progress, even though it was mistakenly wielded.

With the introduction of "A Hero's Life," Strauss seemed suddenly to have entered upon cleaner vision. To this day I am lost in wonder at the vast and appalling ugliness of some parts of the composition, but I know that custom will make dear to us musical idioms which now excite our antipathy. That is an old story. Artusi of Bologna said that Monteverde had lost sight of the true purpose of music,--to give pleasure. A similar accusation was once brought against the mellifluous and tactful Rossini. It was shouted through Europe against Wagner. We may use it against Strauss, but if we do, we must chance the ridicule of the hereafter. "A Hero's Life," despite its frequent attempts to make music speak more definitely than music can, is based on broad moods which are suitable for musical exposition. Wild, chaotic, discordant as many of the passages of this remarkable work certainly seem to us now, there is no denying the extraordinary mastership shown in its thematic development. The Wagnerian method of modifying themes in rhythm and harmony so as to alter their dramatic significance is combined successfully with the methods of the classicists in working out. Modern polyphony, the polyphony of hazardous cross paths in acrid harmony, of the Impinging contrapuntal curves, is handled with consummate ease. It is orchestral technic of the highest kind, but it all aims at making music which shall describe the minutest feelings, the finest shades of thought, and the most varied actions of personages whom the hearer must see with his mind's eye.

It aims at a wider and more detailed expression than the repulsive "Don Juan" and the vulgar "Till Eulenspiegel," but it is clean and wholesome in tone, and most of its material is safe from the charge of unfitness for publication. It is not impossible to conceive of Strauss after producing this work as looking back over his entire orchestral product and addressing us in the words of the inscrutable McIntosh Jellaludin: "Some of it must go; the public are fools and prudish fools. I was their servant once. But do your mangling gently--very gently. It is a great work, and I have paid for it in seven years' damnation."

It is too soon for us to say that Strauss will influence the future. He may leave us nothing but certain purely mechanical improvements in orchestral technics. Even these will have their value. Yet all recent attempts at progress in music have been in the direction of more definite expression, and Strauss may be only a stepping-stone in an advance toward that blissful epoch whose hearers will display as much imagination as its composers, that transcendent condition in which genius understands genius. As in that faculty-free heaven celebrated in undergraduate song, no musical critics will be there. Every man will be his own critic. The millennium will have come.

II.--THE ÆSTHETIC VIEW

Denique sit quidvis, simplex duntaxat et unum.

HORACE, _Ars Poetica_.

Mr. Strauss has been acclaimed as an explorer, a pathfinder in the wilderness of new art. But after all he is simply a product, or perhaps it would be more exact to say a result; for the trend of musical art in the past century was toward representation.

But the attempts of the early composers were in the line of descriptive music, which is a species of mimetics. The transfer of peculiar sounds and characteristic sound-motions, as in the cases of whistling wind and undulating forest billows, to the musical canvas, is a simple and natural process. It pleases the most superficial mind by the translation of one art into terms of another. To "paint" in sounds, as the musicians term it, is a pretty and poetic fancy. It is like the poet's use of tone-speech to imitate qualities or motions. It is the onomatopoetic in music. Sometimes it is the paronymous.

We are all cultivated savages. The primeval hordes of Europe had their rude rhythms and their inarticulate cries, which were as music to their ears. Significance was attached to these sounds wholly because of their external resemblance to something lying in a different plane of human experience. We have refined and extended the scale and have attuned our ears and our spirits to higher tones. We hear triads in stones, scales in running brooks, and chords of the diminished seventh in everything.

How long was it before the musicians ceased to content themselves with their tone pictures of ocean waves and murmuring streams? Surely, it was not long after Monteverde found the rhythmic and instrumental equivalents for the galloping of horses and the crashing together of gallant and knightly combatants that the dream of joy or woe, uttered in songs without words, entered the minds of composers. Monteverde's lament of Arianna showed that the plaint of a sorrowing heart might be most musical, most melancholy. Doubtless, as the indolent Venetian gondolier hummed the melody and forgot the words through the shining avenues of the island city, the thought came dimly to him, as it did clearly to the musician, that the tune was sad and saddening, even without the text.

But not till the time of Beethoven was a direct and explicit effort made to paint soul pictures in wordless music. Beethoven was indeed the regenerator of instrumental art, in that he demonstrated with splendid and convincing power in his later symphonies that the classic sonata form could sing the weal and woe of humanity with eloquence as noble as that of the opera aria aided by the explanatory comment of its own verses.

Beethoven, however, contented himself with broad outlines. He sang passion, joy, grief, resolution, courage, force; but never did he essay to impart to his music the virtue of an explanation. The fifth symphony explains itself and it asks no aid from without. It does not lean back against a wall of text for its support.

The seventh symphony has been subjected to various processes of explanation, but it reads most clearly in its own light as a series of mood pictures. The ninth symphony goes further, and here Beethoven frankly confessed that in order to make his purpose clear he needed text. The construction of the last movement brings to the hearer in its opening measures a solution of the meaning of the three preceding movements. It is the Wagnerian device of prophesying with themes in the early part of a work, and furnishing the key when at length the theme is associated with text later in the composition. There is no utterly new thing under the _cantus firmus_.

Beethoven's psychographics are general and not specific. He does not seek to chase the emotion to its source and to speculate upon its nature and origin. He is content to represent it in tone, to decorate it, if you will, with instrumental color, but there he stops. Shall we say that therefore Beethoven's psychometry was saner and more artistic than that of Strauss and his few brothers in art?

It is a question similar to that which arises in literature anent the comparative merits of Shakespeare and Ibsen. But here is a substantial difference. Shakespeare was unquestionably a mighty poet, and Ibsen is a prose dramatist pure and simple. Shakespeare was an idealist and Ibsen is the arch realist of the age. It is not just criticism to compare these two. You may compare Clyde Fitch with Sheridan or Augustus Thomas with Robertson, if you will, but it is no more honest to compare Ibsen with Shakespeare than it would be to compare him with Æschylus.

But when you come to music, you come to a different issue. Absolute music is an entity. It is a very special branch of an art which has varieties. The lied, for example, is an art form by itself; so is the oratorio, and so again is the music drama of Wagner. It were foolish to try to compare the symphonies of Beethoven with the songs of Schubert and thence to decide which was the greater composer. The development of the symphonic branch of musical art is that in which Beethoven was most specially concerned, and it is to his successors in that field that we must look to study the outcome of his innovations.

When we trace the advance of symphonic art from Beethoven to Strauss, we find a steady and irresistible movement away from the representation of broad, fundamental soul states, from a strictly scientific method of musical psychostatics down to a condition in which the orchestra is transformed into a psychoscope, and the symphony is become a treatise on mental diseases and methods of conversing with the dead. Composers seem bent on pinning down to their artistic dissecting-tables the very essence of the soul itself.

The simple imitative method of the pristine descriptions in tone has become neurotic mimicry, and the melodic and harmonic idioms hint that the modern ear is suffering from acute myringomycrosis, a cheerful affliction caused by the growth of fungi on the ear drum. Fungi are plentiful in damp and noisome places, and these seem to be the artistic haunts of the imaginations of the Ibscene realists in music.

This so-called "romantic" music of to-day owes a considerable debt to the Abbé Liszt, whose undertakings in the domain of art are overestimated by his adulators and undervalued by his detractors. But there is no practical denial of the fact that Liszt fashioned a system and set up a manner in his symphonic poem. Richard Strauss might have been possible without Liszt, but as matters stand we are bound to acknowledge the debt of the composer of "Don Juan" to the composer of "Tasso."

Yet how far beyond Liszt has the psychologic composition of to-day advanced? Liszt did undertake to make his music tell stories, and that is a thing which, with all deference to Liszt, music cannot do and never has done. You have to read Byron's "Mazeppa" to understand Liszt's, just as you have to read Bürger's "Lenore" if you wish to understand so naïve a story-teller as Raff's "Lenore" symphony. How much more necessary is it to read Maeterlinck's "Death of Tintagiles" in order to understand Charles Martin Loeffler? Not a bit.

But Liszt never dreamed of analyzing soul states and those mysterious conflicts of soul and body which form the materials of psychomachy. He never sought to trace the origin of life nor the seat of the vital spark. The abbé was something of a mystic, too, but he knew he was not a genius. A very able dissimulator, a pious Mephistopheles, a Machiavellian master of musical arts, and the father of Cosima Wagner, he exploited his external impositions with consummate skill; and when he sat down to compose, he swore fealty to the highest ideals with all the sincerity of Iago swearing vengeance at the side of the kneeling Othello.

He sent forth into the easy world his purple and yellow masterpieces, and the world called them royal. A little drawing and a great deal of color was what he offered, and the public saw in his splotches of sound Turneresque mystery and mastery. The dear public still loves these works, and will probably continue to do so for many years. And in one respect the public is right. Liszt never tried to be too definite. He left something to the imagination, and when the public has not any imagination, it imagines that it has, and that it is discerning things in Liszt's works which Liszt himself never discovered.

Camille Saint-Saëns of France is, in his boulevardian way, a follower of Liszt. He also has written symphonic poems and he has been wise enough not to go to the uttermost limits of detailed expression. His Hercules is a gentleman and his Omphale dwelt not far from the Rue de Berlin. Hercules went to see her in a Paris cab--you can hear the cocher swear. Omphale dressed him in a Paquin gown and dealt him exquisite love-taps with his rosewood opera cane.

Dainty Hercules of the Boulevard des Italiens and seductive Omphale of the Rue de Berlin! Ye are the Watteau pictures of a would-be pastoral, the mincing marionettes of a cigarette smoker's dream. Between such gentle figures as you and the chortling barbarians of the Strauss phantasy there is the vast and impassable gulf of fetid inspiration which separates Alexander Pope from Rabelais. Though he paint Phaeton swinging wide the chariot of the sun through the affrighted heavens and plunging headlong into Eridanus, or Death strumming the "zig et zig et zag sur son violon," Saint-Saëns is always a gentleman, the Mendelssohn of romantic orchestration.

But the symphonic poem is not confined to Liszt and Saint-Saëns. It has spread itself through all Europe and has inoculated the symphony. Poor Rubinstein! When he wrote his "Ocean" symphony, he held himself within the limits of the art of composition as formulated by Beethoven in his fifth and seventh symphonies. He painted broad mood pictures. He imitated motions as frankly as Haydn. He was elementary, even at times elemental. At any rate, he was sane. He respected the boundaries that lie, as Ambros has shown us, between music and poetry, and did not call upon the tone art to write treatises and handbooks. He strove to induce music to sing the might and majesty of the ocean, but he did not ask it to find the latitude and longitude.

Other masters have struggled to make the symphony more definite in its tale-telling, but till to-day it has succeeded in keeping its place as the epitome of general emotional states. Tschaïkowsky--most vigorous, if not most subtle, of all recent masters, bursting with savage passions, flaming with wild northern fancies--wrote into the symphony the representation of all human sufferings, the yearnings and grim revel, the madness and despair of Russia. But he clung to the deep-laid emotional scheme.

In his overtures he has gone not a whit further than Beethoven did in the "Leonore" No. 3. Tschaïkowsky's "Hamlet," his "Romeo and Juliet," are mood pictures, perfectly comprehensible to all who know the dramas. They class with such works as Goldmark's "Sakuntala" and "Prometheus." Of these latter how clear and convincing is the second with its voices of sea nymphs, its solitude of the ocean, its mad effort of the man, and its lightning blast of Jove.

True, you must know Æschylus, and therein lies the weakness of all this kind of music, its temptation and its danger. If we may go so far, how are we to be estopped from prying further into the mysteries of musical depiction?

How this field has tempted the Frenchmen, and how little they have found in it! After all, Saint-Saëns is not so bad. Think of the intricate platitudes, the prolix prosiness and lofty emptiness of Bruneau's "Penthesilée" and "La Belle aux Bois Dormant" (poèmes symphoniques au sérieux, mes amis), while Godard, Joncières, Paladilhe, and others have dipped respectfully into the romantic _potage_ and barely soiled their fingers. But all have striven to paint in tones, and have at any rate gone as far as sketching in detail.