Franz Liszt, Berlioz and His "Harold" Symphony (1855)

On November 17, 1852, Berlioz's fourteen-year-old Benvenuto Cellini, which had not been heard since its dismal failure at the Opéra in 1838 and 1839, was brilliantly revived in Weimar under Liszt's direction. This was neither the first nor the last of Liszt's generous gestures in behalf of his old friend. Years earlier, in Paris, Liszt had been one of Berlioz's most zealous and most effective partisans. In February 1855 he was to arrange a second "Berlioz Week" in Weimar, and at this time the essay on Berlioz's Harold, an old project, began to take definite shape. A third series of concerts, in January 1856, led indirectly to the writing and composition of Les Troyens.

Since the publication of the collected letters of Liszt to Princess Caroline von Wittgenstein (1900-1902) and of the collected letters of Peter Cornelius (1904-1905), it has been generally recognized that Liszt was only in a very limited sense the author of the later writings published under his name. More recently, the publication of the memoirs of the Countess Marie d'Agoult (1927) and of her correspondence with Liszt (1933 and 1934) has made it clear that this is also true of the earlier writings. The Lettres d'un bachelier-ès-musique are largely the work of the Countess; the writings published from 1850 on -- and these include the monographs on Wagner's Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, on Chopin, on Berlioz, and on the music of the gypsies -- owe at least their literary form to the Princess. How much more they owe is not easy to say. Emile Haraszti ("Liszt -- Author Despite Himself," Musical Quarterly, XXXIII, 490-516) does not hesitate to reduce Liszt's part in the collaboration to the vanishing point and to put the Princess in charge of "an editorial office that published under the name of Liszt" and whose output, except for the Bohémiens, is "without interest, either for Liszt's evolution or as literature." Surely this goes too far. That it was the Princess who first suggested the essay on Berlioz is clear from the published correspondence. But from this it is also clear that Liszt was to provide sketches for her to "develop." The correspondence shows further that Liszt spoke out when "developments" of this kind displeased him, that in the case of the essay on Berlioz he corrected a proof of the first installment, and that the Princess was obliged to consult him before she could cancel a trifling change that he had made in her wording of the title. Whether Haraszti is justified in calling the essay on Berlioz's Harold "obscure, idle balderdash," the reader may judge for himself. But if he agrees, Liszt must bear his share of the blame.

In the realm of ideas there are internal wars, like those of the Athenians, during which everyone is declared traitor to his fatherland who does not publicly take one side or the other and remains an idle spectator of the evil to which the struggle leads. Persuaded of the justice of this procedure, which, if rigorously observed, can only help to put an end to differences and to hasten the victory of those destined for future leadership, we have never concealed our lively and sympathetic admiration for the genius whom we intend to examine today, for the master to whom the art of our time is so decidedly indebted.

All the pros and cons of the noisy quarrel that has sprung up since the appearance of his first works can be reduced to one main point, to suggest which will suffice to show that the consequences inherent in his example go far beyond the pronouncements of those who consider themselves infallible arbitrators in these matters. The blunt antipathies, the accusations of musical high treason, the banishments for life which have been imposed on Berlioz since his first appearance-these have their explanation (why deceive ourselves about it?) in the holy horror, in the pious astonishment which came over musical authorities at the principle implicit in all his works, a principle that can be briefly stated in this form: The artist may pursue the beautiful outside the rules of the school without fear that, as a result of this, it will elude him. His opponents may assert that he has abandoned the ways of the old masters; this is easy -- who wishes to persuade them of the contrary? His adherents may give themselves the greatest pains to prove that his way is neither always nor yet wholly and completely different from that to which one was formerly used what do they gain thereby? Both parties remain convinced that Berlioz adheres no less firmly to the creed which we have just pronounced, whether this is demonstrated in fact by one or by one hundred corroborating circumstances. And for the authorities who have arrogated to themselves the privileges of orthodoxy this is a more than sufficient proof of his heresy. Yet since in art no sect maintains a dogma on the basis of revelation and only tradition is authoritative; since music in particular does not, like painting and sculpture, recognize or adhere to an absolute model; the deciding of disputes between orthodox and heresiarchs depends not only on the court of past and present science, but also on the sense for art and for the reasonable in the coming generation. Only after a considerable lapse of time can a final decision be handed down, for what verdict of the present will be acceptable on the one hand to the older generation,(2) which has borne from youth the easy yoke of habit, and on the other hand to the younger generation, who gather belligerently under any banner and love a fight for its own sake? Old and young must then entrust the solution of problems of this sort to a more or less distant future. To this future is alone reserved the complete or partial acceptance of those violations of certain rules of art and habits of hearing with which Berlioz is reproached. One point, however, is now already beyond all question. The representatives of the development to come will entertain a quite special respect for works exhibiting such enormous powers of conception and thought and will find themselves obliged to study them intensively, just as even now contemporaries approach them nolens volens step by step, their admiration only too often delayed by idle astonishment. Even though these works violate the rules, in that they destroy the hallowed frame which has devolved upon the symphony; even though they offend the ear, in that in the expression of their content they do not remain within the prescribed musical dikes; it will be none the less impossible to ignore them later on as one ignores them now, with the apparent intention of exempting oneself from tribute, from homage, toward a contemporary.

Heaven forbid that anyone, in holding forth on the utility, validity, and advantage of the program, should forswear the old faith and assert that the heavenly art does not exist for its own sake, is not self-sufficient, does not kindle of itself the divine spark, and has value only as the representative of an idea or as an exaltation of language. The choice between such an offense against the art and the complete renunciation of the program cannot remain in doubt, and it would be better to allow one of its most prolific sources to dry up than, by denying its independent existence, to sever its vital nerve. Music embodies feeling without forcing it -- as It is forced in its other manifestations, in most arts and especially in the art of words -- to contend and combine with thought.(3) If music has one advantage over the other means through which man can reproduce the impressions of his soul, it owes this to its supreme capacity to make each inner impulse audible without the assistance of reason, so restricted in the diversity of its forms, capable, after all, only of confirming or describing our affections, not of communicating them directly in their full intensity, in that to accomplish this even approximately it is obliged to search for images and comparisons. Music, on the other hand, presents at one and the same time the intensity and the expression of feeling; it is the embodied and intelligible essence of feeling; capable of being apprehended by our senses, it permeates them like a dart, like a ray, like a dew, like a spirit, and fills our soul. If music calls itself the supreme art, if Christian spiritualism has transported it, as alone worthy of Heaven, into the celestial world, this supremacy lies in the pure flames of emotion that beat one against another from heart to heart without the aid of reflection, without having to wait on accident for the opportunity of self-assertion; it is breath from mouth to mouth, blood flowing in the arteries of life. Feeling itself lives and breathes in music without representational shell,(4) without the meditation of action or of thought; here it ceases to be cause, source, mainspring, moving and energizing principle, in order to reveal itself directly and without intercessory symbols in its indescribable totality, just as the God of the Christians, after having revealed Himself to the chosen through signs and miracles, now shows Himself to them through visions in the beatific aura of His substantial presence. Only in music does feeling, actually and radiantly present, lift the ban which oppresses our spirit with the sufferings of an evil earthly power and liberate us with the whitecapped floods of its free and warmth-giving might from "the demon Thought," brushing away for brief moments his yoke from our furrowed brows. Only in Music does feeling, in manifesting itself, dispense with the help of reason and its means of expression, so inadequate in comparison with its intuition, so incomplete in comparison with its strength, its delicacy, its brilliance. On the towering, sounding waves of music, feeling lifts us up to heights that lie beyond the atmosphere of our earth and shows us cloud landscapes and world archipelagos that move about in ethereal space like singing swans. On the wings of the infinite art it draws us with it to regions into which it alone can penetrate, where, in the ringing ether, the heart expands and, in anticipation, shares in an immaterial, incorporeal, spiritual life. What is it that, beyond this miserable, paltry, earthly shell, beyond these numbered planets, opens to us the meadows of infinity, refreshes us at the murmuring springs of delight, steeps us in the pearly dew of longing; what is it that causes ideals to shimmer before us like the gilded spires of that submerged city, that recalls to us the indescribable recollections that surrounded our cradles, that conducts us through the reverberating workshops of the elements, that inspires us with all that ardor of thirsting after inexhaustible rapture which the blissful experience; what is it that takes hold of us and sweeps us into the turbulent maelstrom of the passions which carries us out of the world into the harbor of a more beautiful life; is it not music, animated by elemental feeling like that which vibrates in us before it manifests itself, before it solidifies and turns cold in the mold of the idea? What other art discloses to its adepts similar raptures, the more precious and ennobling in that they are veiled by a chaste and impenetrable mystery? What other art reveals to its votaries the heavens where angels lovingly hold sway and flies with them in Elijah's chariot through spheres of ecstasy?

As the Slavic poet(5) has it: "The word belies the thought, the deed belies the word." Music does not belie feeling, it does not deceive it, and Jean Paul could exclaim: "O Music! Thou who bringest past and future so near our wounds with their flying flames! . . . O Music! Reverberation from a distant world of harmony! Sigh of the angel within us! When the word is speechless, and the embrace, and the eye, and the tear; when our dumb hearts lie lonely behind the ironwork of our breasts -- then it is Thou alone through whom they call to one another in their dungeons and through whom, in their desert habitation, they unite their distant sighs!"(6) To Hoffmann, music revealed "that faraway country which surrounds us often with the strangest presentiments and from which wondrous voices call down to us, wakening all the echoes that sleep in our restricted breasts, which echoes, awakened now, shoot joyfully and gladly up, as though in fiery rays, making us sharers in the bliss of that paradise. . . . Is not music the mysterious language of a faraway spirit world whose wondrous accents, echoing within us, awaken us to a higher, more intensive life? All the passions battle with one another, their armor shimmering and sparkling, perishing in an inexpressible yearning which fills our breasts."(7)

Who has the temerity to deny to our inspired art the supreme power of self-sufficiency? But need making oneself master of a new form mean forever renouncing the hereditary and historically inculcated one? Does one forswear one's mother tongue when one acquires a new branch of eloquence? Because there are works that demand a simultaneous bringing into play of feeling and thought, shall on this account the pure instrumental style lose its magic for those works that prefer to expend themselves and their entire emotional wealth in music alone without being hindered by a definite object in their freedom of feeling? Would it not amount to a lack of confidence in the vitality of the pure instrumental style were one to anticipate its complete decay simply because there arose at its side a new species, distinct from drama, oratorio, and cantata, but having none the less in common with these the poetic basis?

The dwellers in the antipodes of this new artistic hemisphere will perhaps think to advance a telling argument against it by saying that program music, through its apparent reconciliation of various subspecies, surrenders its own individual character and may not for this reason lay claim to independent existence within the art. They will hold that our art attains its purest expression in instrumental music and that it has in this form arrived at its highest perfection and power, revealed itself in its most kingly majesty, and asserted its direct character most impressively; that music, on the other hand, has from time immemorial taken possession of the word with a view to lending it, through song, the charm and force of its expression and has in consequence always developed in two forms as instrumental and vocal, that these two forms are equally indigenous, equally normal, and that the inventive creator, when he wishes to apply music to definite situations and actual persons, can find sufficient motives in the lyric and dramatic vocal forms, so that there can accordingly be no advantage or necessity for him to cause the peculiar properties of that form of music which exists for its own sake and lives its own life to meet and continue on the same path with the development of that other form which identifies itself with the poetic structure of the drama, with the sung and spoken word.

These objections would be well taken if in art two distinct forms could be combined, but not united. It is obvious that such a combination may be an unharmonious one, and that the work will then be misshapen and the awkward mixture offensive to good taste. This, however, will be due to a fault of execution, not a basic error. Are not the arts in general, and the several arts in particular, quite as rich in variously formed and dissimilar phenomena as nature is in the vicissitudes of her principal kingdoms and their divisions? Art, like nature, is made up of gradual transitions, which link together the remotest classes and the most dissimilar species and which are necessary and natural, hence also entitled to live.

Just as there are in nature no gaps, just as the human soul consists not alone in contrasts, so between the mountain peaks of art there yawn no steep abysses and in the wondrous chain of its great whole no ring is ever missing. In nature, in the human soul, and in art, the extremes, opposites, and high points are bound one to another by a continuous series of various varieties of being, in which modifications bring about differences and at the same time maintain similarities. The human soul, that middleground between nature and art, finds prospects in nature which correspond to all the shadings and modulations of feeling which it experiences before it rests on the steep and solitary peaks of contradictory passions which it climbs only at rare intervals, these prospects found in nature it carries over into art. Art, like nature, weds related or contradictory forms and impressions corresponding to the affections of the human soul; these often arise from cross currents of diverse impulses which, now uniting, now opposing, bring about a divided condition in the soul which we can call neither pure sorrow nor pure joy, neither perfect love nor thorough egoism, neither complete relaxation nor positive energy, neither extreme satisfaction nor absolute despair, forming through such mixtures of various tonalities a harmony, an individuality, or an artistic species which does not stand entirely on its own feet, yet is at the same time different from any other. Art, regarded generally and in the position it occupies in the history of mankind, would not only be impotent, it would remain incomplete, if, poorer and more dependent than nature, it were unable to offer each movement of the human soul the sympathetic sound, the proper shade of color, the indispensable form. Art and nature are so changeable in their progeny that we can neither define nor predict their boundaries; both comprise a host of heterogeneous or intimately related basic elements; both consist in material, substance, and endlessly diverse forms, each of them in turn conditioned by limits of expansion and force; both exercise through the medium of our senses an influence on our souls that is as real as it is indefinable.

An element, through contact with another, acquires new properties in losing old ones; exercising another influence in an altered environment, it adopts a new name. A change in the relative proportions of the mixture is sufficient to make the resultant phenomenon a new one. The amalgamation of forms distinct in their origins will result, in art as in nature, either in phenomena of quite new beauty or in monstrosities, depending on whether a harmonious union or a disagreeable combination promotes a homogeneous whole or a distressing absurdity.

The more we persuade ourselves of the diverse unity which governs the MI in the midst of which man is situated and of that other unity which rules his very life and history, the more we will recognize the diverse unity which reveals itself in the destiny of art, the more we will seek to rid ourselves of our vicious inclination to carp at and curb it, like gardeners who hem in the vegetation in order to grow hedges in a row or who cripple the healthy tree for the sake of artificial shapes. Never do we find in living natural phenomena geometrical or mathematical figures; why do we try to impose them on art, why do we try to subject art to a rectilinear system? Why do we not admire its luxurious, unfettered growth, as we admire the oak, whose gnarled and tangled branches appeal in a more lively way to our imaginations than does the yew, distorted into the shape of a pyramid or mandarin's hat? Why all this desire to stunt and control natural and artistic impulses? Vain effort! The first time the little garden-artist mislays his shears, everything grows as it should and must.

Man stands in inverse relations to art and to nature; nature he rules as its capstone, its final flower, its noblest creature; art he creates as a second nature, so to speak, making of it, in relation to himself, that which he himself is to nature.(8) For all this, he can proceed, in creating art, only according to the laws which nature lays down for him, for it is from nature that he takes the materials for his work, aiming to give them then a life superior to that which, in nature's plan, would fall to their lot. These laws carry with them the ineradicable mark of their origin in the similarity they bear to the laws of nature, and consequently, for all that it is the creature of man, the fruit of his will, the expression of his feeling, the result of his reflection, art has none the less an existence not determined by man's intention, the successive phases of which follow a course independent of his deciding and predicting. It exists and flowers in various ways in conformity with basic conditions whose inner origin remains just as much hidden as does the force which holds the world in its course, and, like the world, it is impelled toward an unpredicted and unpredictable final goal in perpetual transformations that can be made subject to no external power. Assuredly, the scholarly investigator can follow up the traces of its past; he cannot, however, foresee the final purpose toward which future revolutions may direct it. The stars in the heavens come and go and the species inhabiting our earth appear and disappear in accordance with conditions which, in the fruitful and perpetual course of time, bring on and again remove the centuries. Thus it is also with art. The fecundating and life-giving suns of its realm gradually lose their brilliance and warmth, and there appear on its horizon new planets, proud, ardent, and radiant with youth. Whole arts die out, their former life in time recognizable only from the skeletons they leave behind, which, like those of antediluvian races, fill us with astonished surprise; through crossbreeding and blending new and hitherto unknown arts spring up, which, as a result of their expansion and intermingling, will perhaps someday be impelled toward their end, just as in the animal and vegetable kingdoms whole species have been replaced by others. Art, proceeding from man as he himself proceeds, it appears, from nature, man's masterpiece as he himself is nature's masterpiece, provided by man with thought and feeling -- art cannot escape the inevitable change common to all that time begets. Coexistent with that of mankind, its life principle, like the life principle of nature, does not remain for long in possession of the same forms, going from one to another in an eternal cycle and driving man to create new forms in the same measure as he leaves faded and antiquated ones behind.

Like loving gifts of a nature infinitely exalted above his own, like traces within himself of elements that lie without him, man carries in his mind the concepts eternity and nonexistence. Kant first observed the enigmatic contradiction with which the mind, capable of grasping neither the one nor the other, accepts them both. These concepts constitute the two opposite poles of the axis about which man revolves, the idea of existence without beginning or end, and that of nonexistence. Ceaselessly he circles about these two points of reference, inclining now toward the one, now toward the other, shrinking back from the thought of annihilation, horrified by the thought of the immutable. Man's whole environment is but end and beginning, life after death and death before life. Nevertheless he is seized instinctively and inexplicably with an aversion to the weaknesses of all beginnings, to the painful character of every end, while a no less instinctive and inexplicable impulse urges him to destroy in order to re-create. Experiencing disgust once he has reached the saturation point and provoked to desire by his eagerness for novelty, he feels himself impelled in perpetual alternation by an innate and sovereign longing for a satisfaction to which he cannot give a name, but which every change seems to promise him. From the struggle between these two exertions arise conflict and sorrow, our common, inevitable lot.

These two contradictory impulses, which suspend man's mind oscillating and fluctuating between permanence and instability, recur on every hand: in the physical world as centripetal and centrifugal force, in chemistry as formation and disorganization, in morality as improvement and deterioration, in politics as conservation and reform. A hidden power, which we call providence or destiny, regulates their equilibrium by raising or lowering the one scale or the other until, in unforeseen moments, it brings them both into equal oscillation. Struck by the wondrous equilibrium of these so contradictory principles, an equilibrium wise beyond comprehension, manifest in the destinies of mankind as in the worlds of space, Newton exclaims: "Were centripetal and centrifugal forces equal, they would destroy the cosmic mechanism; were they unequal, they would engender chaos; God's finger must hold them in check!" In art and in its oscillation between sterile, outworn forms which continue to vegetate, bearing no new types, and the progress of evolving forms which are still imperfect there is revealed the finger of God which Newton speaks of, that mysterious impulse, that unseen law, which maintains harmony among the most disparate elements, governing our progression in time and beyond time through the agency of genius. Like the conquering Gaul, it casts its shining sword into the scale of the attracting and repelling forces which, on the one hand, draw art toward renewal, betterment, and transformation, on the other seek to keep it in the old ruts, forms, and modes of procedure. So long as genius fails to speak its magic word, this dualism begets a more or less rapidly alternating ebb and flow, a deterioration or improvement of art and taste; sooner or later, however, genius draws art past its laboriously surveyed boundaries in order that its beacon may light the way for mankind, striving forward, like our sun, toward a goal hidden from our sight, not comprehended by our reason. The sun, to be sure, pursues its course with even, measured step toward that point of the firmament whose constellation has strangely and as it were, prophetically been named for Hercules, for the liberator of the Prometheus in whom the human race is symbolized; mankind and art approach their supreme and final transfiguration irregularly and haltingly, now with the slowness and patience characteristic of the mole's subterranean labors, now with a powerful spring, such as the tiger takes toward his prey.

From this variety in the tempo of artistic development proceeds the difficulty of recognizing it in its portents and precursors. One must have taken a step forward before one can recognize as such the progress one has made. As long as this progress remains remote, like an anchorage toward which we sail, only a sort of clairvoyance will enable us to assert positively that we are getting ahead as we approach it. We border here so closely on optical illusion that for skeptics, who regard what others take for progress as retrogressive movement, there can be no demonstrations a priori. At the same time it would be idle to wish to deny or dispute an upward tendency in the psychological development of the human mind, which, embodying itself in constantly nobler arts and forms, strives after constantly wider radiation, after a brighter light, after an infinite exaltation.(9) And it would be equally idle to consign an art or the least of its forms to the class of immovable objects by seeking to demolish the new forms in which it manifests itself or to destroy the shoots that spring from the seeds of ripened fruit. These can never be stunted; no profane hand can restrain their seasonal impulse.

Strange contradiction! Nothing human stands still; cult, custom, law, government, science, taste, and mode of enjoyment -- all change, all are constantly coming and passing away, without rest, without respite; no country is quite like any other, and no century ends in the same atmosphere with which it began; the endeavors, tendencies, improvements, and ideals of each generation plow up the hereditary fields in order to experiment with a new kind of crop. Yet in the midst of all these ferments, in this tempest of time, in this eternal world-rejuvenation, resembling the transformations of nature, if not in majesty then at least in universality, among all the paths of progress is one alone to remain untrodden -- among all the manifestations of the human spirit is the development of the purest and most brilliant one to be forbidden, its mobility forever held in check? Among all the virtual forces, is it proposed to deny precisely to this force, to the supreme force, the possibility of perfection that spirit inspires in matter, which possibility, an echo of that first command of creation, forms, with its "Become!", a harmonious All from the reorganized elements of an embryonic chaos? Wondrous power, noblest sacred gift of existence! Where else but in art canst thou be found? However man employs himself on any path of life, however he discovers, invents, collects, analyzes, and combines -- he creates only in the art work; only here can he out of free will embody feeling and thought in a sensual mold that will preserve and communicate their sense and content. Is art alone, from a given moment on, to remain unaffected by the ebb and flow of its soul, unmoved by the fluctuations of its hopes, unresponsive to all the changing of its dreams, to all the budding and weaving of its ideas? No, certainly not! Art, in general and in particular, sails with mankind down the stream of life, never to mount again to its source. Even when it appears to stand still momentarily, the tides which bear man and his life continue to remain its element. Art moves, strides on, increases and develops, obeying unknown laws, in cycles whose dissimilar return, recurring like the appearance of certain comets, at unpredictable intervals, does not permit the positive assertion that they will not again pass overhead in all their splendor or having passed will not return once more. Only it is not given us to foresee its unawaited reappearance or the undreamed-of glory in which it will then come forward.

When the hour of progress strikes for art, the genius is always found in the breach he fulfills the need of the times, whether it be to bring a discovery from out a misty limbo fully and completely into the light or whether it be to combine single syllables, childishly strung together, into a sonorous word of magical power. It sometimes happens that art blossoms like the plant which gradually unfolds its leaves and that its successive representatives complement one another in equal proportion, so that each master takes only a single step beyond what his teacher has transmitted to him. In such cases, the masses, to whom this slow progress allows ample time, whose niveau is only gradually elevated, are enabled to follow the quest for more perfect procedures and higher inspiration. In other cases, the genius leaps ahead of his time and climbs, with one powerful swing, several rungs of the mystic ladder. Then time must elapse until, struggling after him, the general intellectual consciousness attains his point of view; before this happens it is not understood and cannot be judged. In literature, as also in music, this has often been the case. Neither Shakespeare nor Milton, neither Cervantes nor Camoëns, neither Dante nor Tasso, neither Bach nor Mozart, neither Gluck nor Beethoven (to cite only these glorious names) was recognized by his own time in such measure as he was later. In music, which is perpetually in a formative state (and which in our time, developing at a rapid tempo, no sooner accomplishes the ascent of one peak than it begins to climb another), the peculiarity of the genius is that he enriches the art with unused materials as well as with original manipulations of traditional ones, and one can say of music that examples of artists who have, as it were, leaped with both feet into a future time, are here to be found in greatest abundance. How could their anticipation of the style which they recognized as destined for supremacy fail to be offensive to their contemporaries, who had not sufficient strength to tear themselves loose, as they had done, from the comfortable familiarity of traditional forms? Yet, though the crowd turn its back on them, though envious rivals revile them, though pupils desert them, though, depreciated by the stupid and damned by the ignorant, they lead a tortured, hunted life, at death they leave behind their works, like a salutary blessing. These prophetic works transmit their style and their beauty to one after another of those who follow. It often happens that talents little capable of recognizing their significance are the very first to find ways of utilizing certain of their poetic intentions or technical procedures, whose value they estimate according to their lights. These are soon imitated again and thus forced to approach more closely to what was at first misunderstood, until, in the fumbling inherent in such imitations and tentative approaches, there is finally attained the understanding and glorification of the genius who, in his lifetime, demanded recognition in vain. Not until it has become used to admiring works analogous to his, but of lesser value, does the public receive his precious bequest with complete respect and jubilant applause. The old forms, thus made obscure, soon fall into neglect and are finally forgotten by the younger generation that has grown up with the new ones and finds these more acceptable to its poetic ideal. In this way the gap between the genius, gifted with wings, and the public which follows him, snail-like and circumspect, is gradually filled out.

The poetic solution of instrumental music contained in the program seems to us rather one of the various steps forward which the art has still to take, a necessary result of the development of our time, than a symptom of its exhaustion and decadence, for we cannot presume that it is now already obliged to resign itself to the subtleties and aberrations of raffinement in order that, after having drained all its auxiliary sources and worn out all its means, it may cover up the impotence of its declining years. If hitherto unused forms arise and, through the magic they exert, win acceptance for themselves with thoughtful artists and with the public, in that the former makes use of them while the latter shows its receptivity toward them, it is not easy to demonstrate their advantages and inconveniences in advance so exhaustively that one can strike an average on the basis of which to establish their expectation of longevity and the nature of their future influence. None the less it would be petty and uncharitable to abstain from inquiry into their origin, significance, bearing, and aim in order to treat works of genius with a disdain of which one may later have reason to be ashamed, in order to withhold due recognition to a widening of the field of art, stamping it, on the contrary and without further ado, as the excrescence of a degenerate period.

We shall forgo deriving advantage from a pronouncement of Hegel's if we can be convinced that great minds (those before whose Herculean intellectual labors every head is bowed, quite apart from sympathy for their doctrines) can characterize precisely those forms as desirable which reveal themselves as sickly and contributory to the downfall of art. Hegel appears to foresee the stimulation which the program can give to instrumental music by increasing the number of those understanding and enjoying it when he says, at the end of the chapter on music in his Aesthetics, the intuitive correctness of which as a general survey cannot be prejudiced by certain erroneous conceptions, such as its time brought with it:

The connoisseur, to whom the inner relationships of sounds and instruments are
accessible, enjoys in instrumental music its artistic use of harmonies, interwoven
melodies, and changing forms, he is wholly absorbed by the music itself and takes a
further interest in comparing what he hears with the rules and precepts which he
knows in order to appraise and enjoy the accomplishment to the full, though here the
ingenuity of the artist in inventing the new can often embarrass even the
connoisseur, to whom precisely this or that progression, transition, etc., is
unfamiliar.  So complete an absorption is seldom the privilege of the amateur, to
whom there comes at once a desire to fill out this apparently meaningless outpour of
sound and to find intellectual footholds for its progress and, in general, more
definite ideas and a more precise content for that which penetrates into his soul. In
this respect, music becomes symbolic for him, yet, in his attempts to overtake its
meaning, he is confronted by abstruse problems, rapidly rushing by, which do not
always lend themselves to solution and which are altogether capable of the most
varied interpretations.

We would modify Hegel's opinion only to state it in a more absolute form, for we cannot concede that the artist is satisfied with forms that are too dry for the amateur. We assert, on the contrary, that the artist, even more insistently than the amateur, must demand emotional content in the formal container. Only when it is filled with the former does the latter have significance for him. The artist and the connoisseur who, in creating and judging, seek only the ingenious construction, the artfully woven pattern, the complex workmanship, the kaleidoscopic multiplicity of mathematical calculation and intertwining lines, drive music toward the dead letter and are to be compared with those who look at the luxuriant poetry of India and Persia only from the point of view of grammar and language, who admire only sonority and symmetrical versification, and do not regard the meaning and wealth of thought and image in its expression, its poetic continuity, not to mention the subject which it celebrates or its historical content. We do not deny the usefulness of philological and geological investigations, chemical analyses, grammatical commentaries -- but they are the affair of science, not of art. Every art is the delicate blossom which the solid tree of a science bears at the tips of its leafy branches; the roots ought to remain hidden by a concealing coverlet. The necessity and utility of separating the material and substance in which art embodies itself into their component parts with a view to learning to know and to use their properties do not justify the confusing of science and art, of the study of the one with the practice of the other. Man must investigate art and nature; this is however not the goal of his relation to them -- it is essentially a preparatory -- if likewise important -- moment in them. Both are given him primarily for his enjoyment; he is to absorb the divine harmonies of nature, to breathe out in art the melodies of his heart and the sighs of his soul. A work which offers only clever manipulation of its materials will always lay claim to the interest of the immediately concerned -- of the artist, student, and connoisseur -- but, despite this, it will be unable to cross the threshold of the artistic kingdom. Without carrying in itself the divine spark, without being a living poem, it will be ignored by society as though it did not exist at all, and no people will ever accept it as a leaf in the breviary of the cult of the beautiful. It will retain its value only as long as the art remains in a given state; as soon as art moves on to a new horizon and through experience learns improved methods, it will lose all significance save the historic and will be filed away among the archaeological documents of the past. Poetic art works, on the other hand, live for all time and survive all formal revolution, thanks to the indestructible life principle which the human soul has embodied in them.

If instrumental music calls itself the summit of our art, its least constrained and most absolute manifestation, it does so either by virtue of its capacity to give to certain feelings and passions an expression intelligible to the listener, affecting his soul while his mind follows a logical development agreeing with his inner one, or by virtue of the indescribable enjoyment of indefinable impressions which, by force or in alleviation, transform our whole being into a state, incomprehensible to the unresponsive, often called contemplation of the ideal, so aptly characterized by Hegel as a sort of liberation of the soul, since the soul actually believes itself released from all material fetters and resigns itself unhampered to emotion's endless sea. Each musical constitution recounts to itself, if not quite clearly then at least in an approximate way, the impression which an instrumental poem should transmit from the author to the listener and is conscious of the passions and feelings and their modifications which it unfolds. Even though, in accordance with the propensity of his imagination, the individual clothes these passions and feelings with images of his own, he will be unable to deceive himself about the sort of temperamental activity which the composer intended his work to evoke. Assuredly, one cannot judge a musician's character better than by defining the mood which he leaves in the listener. The difference between the tone-poet and the mere musician is that the former reproduces his impressions and the adventures of his soul in order to communicate them, while the latter manipulates, groups, and connects the tones according to certain established rules and, thus playfully conquering difficulties, attains at best to novel, bold, unusual, and complex combinations.(10) Yet, since he speaks to men neither of his joys nor of his sorrows, neither of resignation nor of desire, he remains an object of indifference to the masses and interests only those colleagues competent to appreciate his facility. The rest pronounce on him the most deadly sentence of all -- they call him dry, meaning thereby that there flows in his work no vital sap, no noble blood, no burning passion, that it is a mere aggregation or crystallization of unorganic particles, comparable to those which scientists exclude from the science of life (biology), that is, from the realm of the living. But still -- strange paradox -- it is only the tone-poet who can widen the boundaries of the art by breaking the chains which restrain the free soaring of his fantasy. Only

	The Master can the moment choose
	With skillful band to break the mold.(11)

The specifically musical composer, who attaches importance to the consumption of the material alone, is not capable of deriving new forms from it, of breathing into it new strength, for no intellectual necessity urges him -- nor does any burning passion, demanding to be revealed, oblige him -- to discover new means. To enrich the form, to enlarge it and make it serviceable, is granted, then, precisely to those who make use of it only as one of the means of expression, as one of the languages which they employ in accordance with the dictates of the ideas to be expressed; the formalists can do nothing better or more intelligent than to use, to popularize, to subdivide, and on occasion to rework what the tone-poets have won.

The program asks only acknowledgment for the possibility of precise definition of the psychological moment which prompts the composer to create his work and of the thought to which he gives outward form. If it is on the one hand childish, idle, sometimes even mistaken, to outline programs after the event, and thus to dispel the magic, to profane the feeling, and to tear to pieces with words the soul's most delicate web, in an attempt to explain the feeling of an instrumental poem which took this shape precisely because its content could not be expressed in words, images, and ideas; so on the other hand the master is also master of his work and can create it under the influence of definite impressions which he wishes to bring to full and complete realization in the listener. The specifically musical symphonist carries his listeners with him into ideal regions, whose shaping and ornamenting he relinquishes to their individual imaginations; in such cases it is extremely dangerous to wish to impose on one's neighbor the same scenes or successions of ideas into which our imagination feels itself transported. The painter-symphonist, however, setting himself the task of reproducing with equal clarity a picture clearly present in his mind, of developing a series of emotional states which are unequivocally and definitely latent in his consciousness -- why may he not, through a program, strive to make himself fully intelligible?

If music is not on the decline, if its rapid progress since Palestrina and the brilliant development which has fallen to its lot since the end of the last century are not the preordained limits of its course, then it seems to us probable that the programmatic symphony is destined to gain firm footing in the present art period and to attain an importance comparable to that of the oratorio and cantata -- in many respects to realize in a modern sense the meaning of these two species. Since the time when many masters brought the oratorio and cantata style to its highest brilliance, to its final perfection, its successful treatment has become difficult; for other reasons too, whose discussion would here be out of place, the two species no longer arouse the same interest as at the time when Handel animated them with the breath of the winged steer. Oratorio and cantata appear to resemble drama in their impersonation and dialogue. But these are after all external similarities, and close examination reveals at once that undeniable differences of constitution prevail. Conflicts of passions, delineations of characters, unexpected peripetias, and continuous action are in them even more noticeably absent than actual representation; indeed we do not for one moment hesitate to deny a close relation here and are on the contrary persuaded that in this form music approaches rather the antique epos, whose essential features it can thus best reproduce. Aside from dialogue, held together by a certain continuity in the action it presents, oratorio and cantata have no more in common with the stage than has the epos; through their leaning toward the descriptive, instrumentation lends them a similar frame. Episode and apostrophe play almost the same role in them, and the effect of the whole is that of the solemn recital of a memorable event, the glory of which falls undivided on the head of a single hero. If we were asked which musical form corresponded most closely to the poetic epos, we should doubt whether better examples could be brought forward than the Israel, Samson, Judas Maccabaeus, Messiah, and Alexander of Handel, the Passion of Bach, the Creation of Haydn, the St. Paul and Elijah of Mendelssohn.

The program can lend to instrumental music characteristics corresponding almost exactly to the various poetic forms; it can give it the character of the ode, of the dithyramb, of the elegy, in a word, of any form of lyric poetry. If all along it has been expressing the moods proper to these various species, it can by defining its subject draw new and undreamed-of advantages from the approximation of certain ideas, the affinity of certain figures, the separation or combination, juxtaposition or fusion of certain poetic images and perorations. What is more, the program can make feasible for music the equivalent of a kind of poetry unknown to antiquity and owing its existence to a characteristically modern way of feeling -- the poem ordinarily written in dialogue form which adapts itself even less readily than the epos to dramatic performance.

It is our opinion that one does violence to the stage, to say the least, when one seeks to impose constructions on it that have taken root and flowered in other fields of poetry and literature and have gone through a development quite different from its own. For all this, the stage is always more receptive to the transplanting of motives from the classical epos than it is to those modern poems which, for want of a better name, we shall call philosophical epopoeias; among these Goethe's Faust is the colossus, while beside it Byron's Cain and Manfred, and the Dziady of Mickiewicz constitute immortal types. In the epos it is not the persons, but the action, that is unsuited to the theater; the genius, however, can overcome this difficulty, if not without effort, then the more brilliantly. In the epopoeia it is the persons themselves who fail to meet the requirements of the stage, for they are for the most part animated by feelings which, in their height and depth, are inaccessible to the majority who make up the bulk of the dramatic audience.

In the epos and in Homer, its inspired model, it is a hero, gifted with heroic human virtues, whose great deeds occupy the foreground, while a series of the figures of episodic narrative group themselves about him. Their great number is regarded as an enrichment of the work, the variety of their several appearances as one of its beauties. They are depicted with quick, bold strokes and exhibit their characters through actions and speeches without precise description or detailed portrayal. The play of their simple, natural passions is content with the presumptions granted by ordinary experience. The marvelous appears here as something quite as foreign and superior to man's will as natural force. Nature herself is depicted in her full coloring and admired as a power, as a drama. In the modern epopoeia she is rather celebrated than depicted; here her mysterious relations to the constitution of the human soul are unriddled; here she almost ceases to be an object and intervenes in the development as though an active person, in order to curb man by her example, sharing his impressions, consoling him, and lulling him to sleep with her dreams. Before her, the action and the event lose their importance, and the number of the episodic figures, apart from this sketched only lightly, shrinks together. The marvelous gives place to the fantastic; wholly exempt from the laws of probability, compressed and modified, the action acquires a symbolic luster, a mythological basis. No longer do supernatural beings disturb us by their intrusion into the development of human interests; they have to a certain extent become embodiments of passionate desires and hopes and appear now as personifications of our inner impulses. No longer does the poem aim to recount the exploits of the principal figure; it deals with affections active within his very soul. It has become far more important to show what the hero thinks than how he acts, and for this reason a limited concurrence of facts suffices to demonstrate how predominantly this or that feeling affects him. Dialogue becomes of necessity an excuse for monologue. To be sure, a hero is still celebrated, not however with a view to recalling his wanderings, for not even the choice of hero falls any longer on those who are patterns of extraordinary virtues. On the contrary, the modern hero often typifies rare and abnormal impulses, little familiar to the human heart. How these take root in the soul, mount flaming to the heavens, and, in subsiding, cast a flickering light on the ruins of the heart -- all this is painstakingly and exhaustively depicted. While the antique epos exhibits to us the majority of mankind and, in its truthful and exact portrayal of character, causes us to admire its profound insight into the soul, the romantic species, as we shall call it, seeks out exceptional figures only; these it draws far beyond life-size and in unusual situations, so that there recognize themselves in them only those constitutions that are formed of a finer clay and animated by a warmer breath, that lead a more powerfully pulsating life than others, with a more responsive soul. Nevertheless they often exert an irresistible magic for all, idealizing in the eye of the plain man inclinations which he experiences and understands in a similar way, only more dully, less distinctly, less pervasively. The supreme charm and greatest merit of these art works lie in their eloquent expression of the most animated, most profound, and often most penitent feelings of great hearts.

If now, despite essential differences, we identify these two species of poetry and group them together under the common name epopoeia, we do so because of a similarity which seems to us more important than that of form and scale. Thanks to the cast which genius has given to their features, both species -- small in number but great in value -- reflect in the most lively manner the spirit of the age and nation which produced them. The antique epos offers us a typical, almost statuesque picture of ancient peoples. Formerly, in the poet's work, a people recognized themselves, as in a faithful mirror, with their morals, their religion, their politics, and their whole activity; today, however, when the distinguishing features of those peoples participating in the Christian civilization tend more and more to become obliterated, the poet naturally feels more drawn to characterize the century and the way of feeling which animates the man of the century (as Goethe and Byron have done in figures whose nationality one recognizes, so to speak, only from their costumes), to give permanent form to the ideal psychological impulse which in his time animates the cultivated man throughout Europe. Why should not music join in this new manifestation of the human spirit?

In literature, no one any longer denies that Goethe and Byron were justified in inventing or introducing the philosophical epopoeia as a narrative of inner events, of the fermentation, within the heart, of germs predominantly present in this or that nation or epoch, of exclusive psychological states which, when transferred to an individual being, impel it to actions sufficient to sign a destiny with the stamp of evil. No one any longer complains that these great poets chose as heroes exceptional natures, comparable to those legendary wonder-plants whose blossoms, responsive to the favorable or pernicious external conditions of their existence, distilled a corrosive poison, so that they either destroyed themselves or became fruits of paradise from which a single drop of ambrosia could reanimate the most withered lips. Is music unsuited to cause such natures to speak its language? To represent their origin and metamorphosis, their glorious ascent or downfall, their morbid outbreaks and redeeming powers, to portray their inspiring or awesome end? But could music do this in the drama? Scarcely. Literature itself cannot present upon the stage passions whose meandrine progress most be followed from their source to their disappearance in the eddies of the past. The interest which they arouse attaches itself far more to inner events than to actions related to the outer world.

Would perhaps the specifically musical symphony be better suited to such subjects? We doubt it. The conflict between its independent style and the one forced on it by the subject would affect us disagreeably, being without evident or intelligible cause. The composer would cease to conduct our imagination into the regions of an ideal common to all mankind and, without definitely announcing the particular path he wishes to choose, would only lead the listener astray. With the help of a program, however, he indicates the direction of his ideas, the point of view from which he grasps a given subject. The function of the program then becomes indispensable, and its entrance into the highest spheres of art appears justified. Surely we have no wish to question the capacity of music to represent characters similar to those the poet princes of our time have drawn. For the rest, we see music arrived at such a point in its relations of dependence on and correspondence with literature, we see at the same time all human feeling and thinking, aim and endeavor, so overwhelmingly directed toward profound inquiry into the sources of our sufferings and errors, we see all other arts, vying one with another in their efforts to satisfy the taste and needs of our time, consumed so specifically by the desire to give expression to this urge, that we consider the introduction of the program into the concert hall to be just as inevitable as the declamatory style is to the opera. Despite all handicaps and setbacks, these two trends will prove their strength in the triumphant course of their development. They are imperative necessities of a moment in our social life, in our ethical training, and as such will sooner or later clear a path for themselves. The custom of providing instrumental pieces with a program has already found such acceptance with the public that musicians cease to struggle against it, regarding it as one of those inevitable facts which politicians call faits accomplis. The words of an author previously cited will serve as proof of this.

Fine instrumental music must reckon with a much smaller number of competent listeners
than opera; to enjoy it fully requires genuine artistic insight and a more active and
experienced sensitivity. With the large audience, coloring will always pass as
expression, for unless it consist of individuals capable of forming an abstract ideal
-- something not to be expected of a whole auditorium, no matter how select it may be
-- it will never listen to a symphony, quartet, or other composition of this order
without outlining a program for itself during the performance, according to the
grandiose, lively, impetuous, serenely soothing, or melancholy character of the
music. By means of this trick, listeners identify most concerts of instrumental music
with the expression of certain passionate feelings; they imagine an action differing
from those imagined by others as individuals differ among themselves. I speak here of
the most cultivated, since for many, frequently for the majority, instrumental music
is only a sensual pleasure, if not indeed a tiresome enigma. For them, instrumental
music has neither coloring nor expression, and I simply do not know what they look
for in it.(12)

Is it not evident from this that it is merely a question of officially recognizing an already existing power with a view to allowing it greater freedom of action and assisting it in the removal of its liabilities, so that henceforward it may work toward its future, toward its fame, not secretly, but in the deliberate repose that comes with an established success?

Through song there have always been combinations of music with literary or quasi-literary works; the present time seeks a union of the two which promises to become a more intimate one than any that have offered themselves thus far. Music in its masterpieces tends more and more to appropriate the masterpieces of literature. What harm can come to music, at the height to which it has grown since the beginning of the modern era, if it attach itself to a species that has sprung precisely from an undeniably modern way of feeling? Why should music, once so inseparably bound to the tragedy of Sophocles and the ode of Pindar, hesitate to unite itself in a different yet more adequate way with works born of an inspiration unknown to antiquity, to identify itself with such names as Dante and Shakespeare? Rich shafts of ore lie here awaiting the bold miner, but they are guarded by mountain spirits who breathe fire and smoke into the faces of those who approach their entrance and, like Slander, whom Voltaire compares to coals, blacken what they do not burn, threatening those lusting after the treasure with blindness, suffocation, and utter destruction.

To our regret we must admit that a secretly smoldering but irreconcilable quarrel has broken out between vocational and professional musicians. The latter, like the Pharisees of the Old Law, cling to the letter of the commandment, even at the risk of killing its spirit. They have no understanding of the love revealed in the New Testament, for the thirst after the eternal, the dream of the ideal, the search for the poetically beautiful in every form. They live only in fear, grasp only fear, preach only fear, for them, fear (not precisely the fear of the Lord, however) is the beginning and end of all wisdom, they hang on the language of the law with the pettiness of those whose hearts have not taught them that the fulfillment of the prophecy lies in the abolition of the sacrifice, in the rending of the veil of the temple; their wisdom consists in dogmatic disputes, in sterile and idle speculation on subtleties of the rules. They deny that one may show greater honor to the old masters by seeking out the germs of artistic development which they embedded in their works than by servilely and thoughtlessly tracing the empty forms whose entire content of air and light they drained themselves in their own day. On the other hand the vocational musicians hold that to honor these patriarchs one must regard the forms they used as exhausted and look on imitations of them as mere copies of slight value. They do not hope to glean further harvests from fields sown by giants and believe that they cannot continue the work already begun unless, as the patriarchs did in their time, they create new forms for new ideas, put new wine into new bottles.

To Berlioz and his successes has been opposed from the beginning, like an insurmountable dam, that academic aversion to every art product which, instead of following the beaten path, is formed in accordance with an unaccustomed ideal or called up by incantations foreign to the old rite. But with or without the magisterial permission of the titulary and non-titulary professors -- even without that of the illustrious director of the Paris Conservatoire, who visited Berlioz' concerts quite regularly in order, as he put it, "to learn how not to do it" -- everyone who would keep up with contemporary art must study the scores of this master, precisely to see what is being done today and "to learn how to do it." And in truth, the so-called classicists themselves are not above making use of overheard and stolen ideas and even, in exceptional cases, of conceding that Berlioz does after all show talent for instrumentation and skill in combining, since he is one of those artists, previously mentioned, who through the wider expression of their feelings and the freer unfolding of their individuality expand and enrich the form and make it serviceable. In the last analysis, however, the hypocrisy of his envious opponents consists in refusing to pay him the tuition they owe and have on their conscience while they publicly tread into the mire everything of his which they are not and never will be capable of imitating and privately pull out all feathers of his which they can use as ornaments themselves. We could name many who rise up against Berlioz, though their best works would be disfigured were one to take from them everything for which they are obliged to him. We repeat, therefore, that unusual treatment of form is not the supreme unpardonable error of which Berlioz is accused; his opponents will indeed concede, perhaps, that he has done art a service in discovering new inflections. What they will never forgive is that form has for him an importance subordinate to idea, that he does not, as they do, cultivate form for form's sake; they will never forgive him for being a thinker and a poet.

Strangely enough, that union of music and literature of which we have already spoken, constantly increasing in intimacy, developing itself with surprising rapidity, is gaining firm footing despite the equally lively opposition of professional musicians and men of letters. Both parties set themselves against it with the same vigor, with the same obstinacy. The latter, looking askance, see their property being taken over into a sphere where, apart from the value they placed on it, it acquires new significance; the former are horrified at a violation of their territory by elements with which they do not know how to deal. The tone-poets have hence to contend with a double enmity; they find themselves between two fires. But the strength of their cause compensates for the weakness of their position. Whether one recognizes it or not, the fact remains that both arts, more than ever before, feel themselves mutually attracted and are striving for inner union.

Through the endless variety of its forms, art reproduces the endless variety of constitutions and impressions. There are characters and feelings which can attain full development only in the dramatic; there are others which in no wise tolerate the limitations and restrictions of the stage. Berlioz recognized this. From the church, where it was for so many centuries exclusively domiciled and from whence its masterpieces scarcely reached the outer world, musical art moved by degrees into the theater, setting up there a sort of general headquarters or open house where anyone might exhibit his inspirations in any genre he chose. For a while it would scarcely have entered the head of any musician to regard himself as incapable of composing dramatic works. It seemed as though, on admission to the musical guild or brotherhood, one also acquired and accepted the ability, sanction, and duty to supply a certain number of operas, large or small, romantic or comic, serie or buffe. All hastened to the contest in this arena, hospitably open to everyone. When the terrain of the boards proved slippery, later on, some crept and others danced on the tightrope, many provided themselves with hammers instead of balancing poles and, when their neighbors struggled to keep their balance, hit them over the head. Some bound golden skates to their feet and with their aid left way behind them a train of poor devils, panting to no avail; certain ones, like messengers of the gods, had at their head and heels the wings given them at birth by genius, by means of which, if they did not precisely make rapid progress, they were able at least to fly on occasion to the summit. And, for all that these last remained, here as elsewhere, very much in the minority, they none the less imposed on their successors so great an obligation to surpass their accomplishment that a moment seems to have arrived which should cause many to ask themselves whether the sense of duty which urges them to join in this turmoil is not a prepossession. Those, indeed, who expect more of fame than a draft to be discounted by the present, more than a gilt-paper crown to be snatched at by fabricators of artificial flowers -- let them ask themselves whether they were really born to expend their energies in this field, to course and tourney in these narrow lists; whether their temperament does not impel them toward more ideal regions; whether their abilities might not take a higher flight in a realm governed by fewer constraining laws; whether their freer fantasy might not then discover one of those Atlantides, blissful isles, or unknown constellations for which all students of the earth and sky are seeking. We for our part are persuaded that not every genius can limit his flight within the narrow confines of the stage and that he who cannot is thus forced to form for himself a new habitaculum.

To seek to import a foreign element into instrumental music and to domesticate it there by encroaching upon the independence of feeling through definite subjects offered to the intelligence in advance, by forcing upon a composer a concept to be literally represented or poetically formulated, by directing the attention of the listener, not only to the woven pattern of the music, but also to the ideas communicated by its contours and successions -- this seems to many an absurd, if not a sacrilegious undertaking. Small wonder that before Berlioz they cover their heads and let their beards grow -- before him who carries this beginning so far that, by symbolizing its presence, he causes the human voice to be heard in the hitherto wholly impersonal symphony; before him who undertakes to impart to the symphony a new interest, to enliven it with an entirely new element; before him who -- not content to pour out in the symphony the lament of a common woe, to cause to sound forth in it the hopes of all and to stream forth from its focus the affections and shocks, sorrows and ardors, which pulse in the heart of mankind -- takes possession of its powers in order to employ them in the expression of the sufferings and emotions of a specific, exceptional individual! Since the pleasure of listening to orchestral works has always been an altogether subjective one for those who followed the poetic content along with the musical, it seems to many a distortion, a violence done to its character, that the imagination is to be forced to adapt completely outlined pictures to that which is heard, to behold and accept figures in precisely the way the author wills. The hitherto usual effect of pure instrumental music on poetic temperaments may perhaps be compared to that which antique sculpture produces in them; in their eyes, these works also represent passions and forms, generating certain movements of the affections, rather than the specific and particular individuals whose names they bear -- names, moreover, which are for the most part again allegorical representations of ideas. For them, Niobe is not this or that woman stricken by this or that misfortune; she is the most exalted expression of supreme suffering. In Polyhymnia they see, not a specific person engaged in specific speech or action, but the visible representation of the beauty, harmony, charm, and magic of that compelling, yet soft and placid persuasion whose eloquence can be concentrated in a single glance. Minerva, for them, is not only the divine, blue-eyed mentor of Ulysses; she is also the noblest symbol of that gift of our spirit which simultaneously judges and divines; who, provided with all the attributes of force, armed with all the weapons of war, is still a friend of peace; who, bearing lance and breastplate, causes her most beautiful gift, the olive tree, to sprout, promising peace who, possessor of the terrifying aegis, loses nothing of the kindliness and attraction of her smile, of the slowly sinking cadence of her movements.

Just as marble presents artistic formulations of general concepts to the eye, so the ear, in instrumental music, desires something similar. For the cultivated listener, one symphony expresses to a supreme degree the several phases of passionate, joyous feeling, another -- elegiac mourning, another -- heroic enthusiasm, still another -- sorrow over an irreparable loss. If, then, these cultivated listeners are accustomed to seek and find in an art work the abstract expression of universal human feeling, they must experience a natural distaste for everything that aims to lend this universality concrete character, to make it particular, to derive it from a specific human figure. They have admittedly the undeniable right, the inalienable duty, to wish to see this species of creative activity maintained; shall other species for this reason be scolded out of their right to existence? Shall those who feel driven by their genius and by the spirit of the age to discover new molds be bowed beneath the yoke of a uniform way of working? Or should one not rather fear to see them renounce ambitions which they would admirably succeed in realizing in order to deny their birthright in efforts not in agreement with the nature of their inspiration?

NOTES

1. Text: Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, XLIII (1855), 25-26, 40-46, 49-55, 77-79,
80-81. The essay was published in five installments; the present abridged translation
includes the beginning of the first installment, the latter part of the second, all
of the third, and the beginning of the fourth. As printed in 1855, the text is a
translation into German, by Richard Pohl, from the French original of Liszt and the
Princess Wittgenstein. The later German "translation," by Lina Ramann (Gesammelte
Schriften, IV [Leipzig, 1882], 1-102) is simply a fussy revision of the earlier one. 


2. "The majority would like to see themselves benefited but do not wish their
cherished ways of living disturbed, just at the sick man would gladly regain his
health but gives up unwillingly that which has made him sick . . . . When an original
work appears, demanding that the listener assimilate its ideas instead of appraising
its new spirit in the light of traditional concepts and that he adopt the new concept
absolutely essential to new ideas, the majority, in the midst of their fervent 
longings for the 'new,' shrink from the difficulty and find consolation in the
warmed-over old, persuading themselves, wherever possible, that it is new." -- Marx,
Die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts (2d ed., Leipzig, 1873), pp. 154-155. 

3. "Music is spirit or soul, sounding without mediation for itself alone and finding
satisfaction in its self-recognition; . . . the language of the soul, which pours out
the inner joy and the sorrow of temperament in sound and in this outpouring raises
itself in alleviation above natural emotional forces, in that it transforms the
momentary state of affection in the inner self into one of self-recognition, into a
free introspection, and in this way liberates the heart from oppression and suffering
. . . . If now, speaking generally, we have already been able to regard activity in
the realm of the beautiful as a liberation of the soul, as a renunciation of
affliction and constraint, . . . then music carries this liberation to its extreme
limit . . . . The special task of music is that, in presenting any content to the
mind, it presents it neither as it is latent in consciousness as a general concept,
nor as definite external form offers itself elsewhere in observation or is through 
art more completely represented, but rather in the way in which it becomes alive in 
the sphere of subjective inwardness.
	" . . . If we refrain from mere intellectual analysis and listen without
restraint, the musical art work absorbs us completely and carries us along with it,
independent of the power which art as art in general exerts on us. The peculiar
power of music is an elemental power, that is to say, it lies wholly in the element
of sound in which the art here moves." -- Hegel, Aesthetik, III, iii, 2. 

4. "Let us readily concede that our art in incapable of immediately presenting a
character picture or any other object clearly and completely to the eye, as do poetry
and painting. As compensations, it transcends the latter in having the power of
progressive development, the former in being able to present the simultaneous speech
of distinct and contrary characters.  It cannot call by name, cannot define who you
are, but it can successively exhibit, as they become perceptible, all the impulses of
your temperament. And it assembles you, with your likes and opposites, and presents
you all to us just as you live, breathing and echoing out your lives, so that from
the nature and being of the many we fully comprehend the one. It is a progressive
monologue, filled to the full with a dialogue-like, dialectic content, two-sided and
many-sided as Plato's dialogues aim to be, but treated artistically with the emphasis
on genuinely dramatic contrasts and conflicts." -- Marx, loc. cit., p. 54. 

5. Mickiewicz.

6. See Strunk, p. 772.

7. See Strunk, p. 782.

8. Cf. Richard Wagner, Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft, I. 1 ( see p. 876 in Strunk). 

9. "One cannot reflect on the deeper significance of the three great (so to
speak) cardinal arts -- plastics. painting and music -- without being constantly
reminded of the history of the three great (so to speak) cardinal senses -- touch,
sight and hearing. Then quite unsought there come to light most remarkable relations
between the evolution of these senses in the animate world of the planets and the
evolution of these forces in the history of mankind. Just as touch is the first and
altogether most indispensable means by which the living creature orientates itself,
so some form of plastics is the first and most essential art of peoples, the earliest
to attain to full development. Sight, that miraculous perception of the most delicate
light-effects, appears for the first time at a higher level in the animal kingdom,
exhibiting, moreover, a certain inconstancy, seating itself now in a single eye, now
in thousands of eyes, again on occasion degenerating altogether, even in the highest
animal forms. The flowering of painting falls accordingly in mankind's middle period,
assuming the most varied forms, coming to the fore and on occasion retreating
suddenly into the background. Still later, indeed last of all, hearing develops,
merely prefiguring itself in the higher mollusks and only from the fishes on becoming
a permanent property of the animal world, seating itself now with greater constancy
and symmetry in two organs, no more, no less, a right one and a left one, and from
henceforth never again wanting. In similar measure, genuine music appears only in the
last centuries; firm in its basic laws, at the same time developing itself and only
holding to these as though riding at anchor, capable of the most delicate and most
inspired variation, it thus becomes the mystery in which, free from all imitation of
the world of actuality, the spiritualized world of feeling is reflected. If those
other arts have long since passed the high point in their development, the full
flowering of the tonal world falls in most recent times, and here, hidden under a
thin shell, there are still latent many secrets, ready assuredly to reveal themselves
to the right rhabdomancer." -- Carus. 

10. May we be permitted to quote once again from Hegel, who, in his appraisal and
presentation of many important points in music, was led on by that keenness of
instinct, often met with in talented constitutions, which deceives them less often
than sophistry does in matters which they are incapable of regarding with the same
impartiality.
	"It may be, on the one hand, that we enjoy mere sensuous sound and euphony
without further inward participation; on the other hand, that we follow the harmonic
and melodic succession which neither affects nor extends the inner self, observing it
intellectually. Such a purely intellectual analysis, for which there is nothing in
the art work beyond the ingenuity of skillful fabrication, is indeed present in music
to an unusual degree . . . . To be sure, the composer can impart to his work a 
certain meaning, a content of ideas and emotions in organized and self-contained
succession: conversely, without regard for such a content, he can concern himself
with the purely musical structure of his work and with the ingenuities of such
architectonic. In this case, however, the musical product can easily become something
relatively devoid of thought and feeling, requiring otherwise no deep consciousness,
cultivation, or temperament. As a result of this want of matter, we can frequently
observe the development of the gift of composition in very young children, and 
talented composers often go through life the most inane and unobservant of men. The
deeper implication, then, is that even in instrumental music the composer should
devote equal attention to both sides -- to the expression of an admittedly indefinite
content and to musical structure -- whereby he is once more at liberty to give the
preference now to the melodic, now to the depth and complexity of the harmonic, now
to the characteristic, and also to combine these elements one with another. . . . I
have already observed that of all the arts, music possesses the greatest capacity for
freeing itself, not only from any actual text, but also from the expression of any 
definite content, finding satisfaction in a mere self-contained succession of the
combinations, modifications, contrasts, and transitions that fall within the province
of the purely musical. Then, however, music remains empty and meaningless, and,
lacking one of the chief sides of art in general, is not yet properly to be reckoned
as art. Only when a spiritual content is adequately expressed in the sensual element
of the sounds and their varied configurations does music rise to the level of genuine
art, regardless of whether this content receives its more immediate identification
expressly through words or whether it is in a less definite way perceptible to the
sounds and their harmonic relationships and melodic animation."
	For all that Hegel is criticized for having spoken about music without
possessing a wide knowledge of the art, we find his judgments on the whole to the
point, as though dictated by that straightforward, healthy intelligence which
coincides with the general conviction. He furthermore admits his lack of competence
with a modesty which less important folk would do well to imitate and complains that
his requests to be set right met with little response. "The sound and exhaustive
treatment of the subject,"  he says, "presupposes a more exact knowledge of the rules
of composition and a wholly different acquaintance with the masterpieces of musical
literature than I possess or have been able to obtain at second hand, for one never
hears anything detailed or definite about these matters from connoisseurs and
practical musicians as such, from the latter, often the most unintelligent of people,
least of all." 

11. Schiller, Das Lied von der Glocke (translated by J. S. Dwight, Boston, 1839).

12. Fétis.