The characteristic difference between the poet in words and the poet in tones consists in the fact that the poet in words has compressed endlessly scattered components of action, feeling, and expression that could be apprehended only by the understanding into a point as recognizable to the feeling as possible. In contrast, the poet in tones now has to expand this compressed dense point to the greatest profusion in accordance with its full content of feeling. The procedure of the poetical understanding, in its need to communicate with the feeling, was directed to gathering itself together from the furthest regions into the most compact perceptibility for the receptive capacity of the senses. From this point of departure, from the point of direct contact with the receptive capacity of the senses, the poem has to expand itself fully, just as the receiving organ of sense, which equally has compressed itself into a dense, outwardly directed point for the perception of the poem, expands itself by means of this direct reception into continuously wider and wider circles until every inner capacity of feeling has been excited.
The perversion in the unavoidable procedure of the isolated poet and the isolated musician formerly has lain precisely in the fact that the poet, in order to communicate comprehensibly to the feeling, spread himself out into that poorly defined breadth in which he became a describer of a thousand particularities that were supposed to place a definite form before the phantasy in as recognizable a way as possible. Beset by these manifold colorful particularities, the phantasy time and again could only master the presented object finally by seeking to grasp the confusing details exactly, and in this way it lost itself in the activity of the pure understanding, to which the poet could have recourse again only if he at last looked around, stupefied by the vast breadth of his descriptions, for a familiar point of support. The absolute musician, on the other hand, found himself compelled in his forms to compress an endlessly broad element of feeling into definite points that were as perceptible as possible to the understanding. To this end he had to renounce the abundance of his element more and more, labor to condense the feeling to a thought--which was impossible, however, in itself--and finally commend this condensation to the despotic phantasy by divesting it of every expression of feeling, so that it was only a conceptualized appearance, imitative of whatever external object was desired.----In this way music resembled the beloved God of our legends, who descended from heaven to earth, but to make himself visible here had to assume the form and dress of ordinary everyday people. No one any longer noticed the beloved God in the often tattered beggar. But now the true poet is to come, who with the clairvoyant eye of the poet's greatest extremity of need for redemption will recognize the beloved God in the shabby beggar, take from him crutches and rags, and fly up with him on the breath of his ardent longing into endless space, in which the rescued God can pour out in his breath the infinite raptures of the most blissful feeling. Thus will we cast behind us the paltry speech of everyday life, in which we still are not That which we can be and therefore also still do not proclaim what we can proclaim, to speak a language in the work of art in which alone we are able to articulate That which we must proclaim if we are wholly That which we can be.
Now the tone poet has to define the tones of the verse in their interrelated capacity of expression in such a way that they reveal not only the feeling content of this or that vowel as a particular vowel, but at the same time also present this content to the feeling as one related to all the tones of the verse, and this related content as a particular example of the original relatedness of all tones.
For the poet in words, the disclosure to the feeling and through this to the understanding of a finally self-evident relationship of the accents he emphasized was possibly only through the concording alliteration of the linguistic roots. What defined this relationship, however, was plainly only the particularity of the same consonant; no other consonant could rhyme with this one, and the relationship was therefore restricted to a particular family that was recognizable to the feeling only through the fact that it revealed itself as a wholly separate family. The tone poet on the other hand has at his disposal a context of relationship that reaches into the infinite, and if the word poet had to content himself with presenting to the feeling only the specially emphasized word roots of his phrase as related in sensation as well as in sense by means of the full equality of their beginning consonants, the musician in contrast has to present the relatedness of his tones first of all in such extension that with the accents as points of departure he diffuses this relatedness over all, even the unstressed, vowels of the phrase, so that not the vowels of the accents alone but all the vowels in general present themselves to the feeling as related among themselves.
Just as the accents in the phrase receive their particular light not only first of all through their sense but also in their sensuous demonstration through the less emphasized words and syllables that are found in the accentual troughs, so the principal tones have to secure their particular light from the secondary tones, which must be related to the former in exactly the same manner as the upbeats and subsiding beats are related to the stresses. The choice and meaning of those secondary words and syllables as well as their relationship to the accented words was determined primarily by the intelligible content of the phrase; only to the extent that this intelligible content was intensified through the condensation of more comprehensive components into a compressed expression which was strikingly perceptible to the sense of hearing did it transform itself into an emotional content. Now the choice and meaning of the secondary tones as well as their relationship to the principal tones is no longer dependent on the intelligible content of the phrase to the extent that this has already been condensed into an emotional content in rhythmical verse and in alliteration, and the full realization of this emotional content through its most immediate communication to the senses from here on is to be effected only where through the dissolution of the vowel in the singing tone the pure speech of feeling has been acknowledged as the only one still competent. From the musical sounding of the vowel in spoken language on, feeling has been elevated as the definitive director of all further disclosure to the senses, and musical feeling alone now goes on to determine the choice and significance of the secondary as well as the principal tones, and it does this, to be sure, according to the nature of tonal relationship, the particular member of which is chosen by the necessary emotional expression of the phrase.
But the relationship of tones is musical harmony, which we here first of all have to comprehend in its surface extension, in which there are represented the constituent families of the widely ramified relationship of the keys. If we now keep in view the horizontal extension of harmony that is intended here, we expressly reserve the decisive property of harmony in its vertical extension that underlies it as the definitive factor of our representation. That horizontal extension as the upper surface of harmony, however, is its physiognomy, which is still recognizable to the eye of the poet: it is the mirror of water that still reflects back to the poet his own image just as it simultaneously conducts this image also to the contemplative eye of those to whom the poet desired to communicate. But this image is really the actualized intention of the poet--a realization that again is only possible to the musician if he emerges from the depth of the sea of harmony to its surface, on which there is celebrated precisely the rapturous marriage of the creative poetic thought with music's infinite capacity for parturition.
That undulating reflection is melody. In it the poetic thought becomes an irresistibly arresting impulse of feeling, just as the emotive power of music secures the capacity in it to present human phenomena distinctly and convincingly, sharply defined, and shaped into plastic individuality. Melody is the liberation of the endlessly conditioned poetic thought into the deeply felt consciousness of the highest emotional freedom: it is the involuntary that is desired and demonstrated, the unconscious that is conscious and clearly announced, the justified necessity of an infinitely comprehensive content, compressed from the broadest ramification into the most distinct expression of feeling.
If we now compare this melody which appears on the horizontal surface of harmony as a reflection of the poetic thought and which is aligned to the fundamental relationship of tones by its adoption into a constituent family of this relationship--the key--with that primeval maternal melody from which speech in words was once born, there is revealed to us the following extremely important distinction, here to be kept clearly in view.
From an infinitely flowing emotional capacity, human feelings first of all concentrated themselves gradually into a more and more definite content, to express themselves in that primeval melody in such a way that the naturally necessary progress in it was finally intensified into the development of purely verbal language. The most distinctive feature of the oldest lyric is this one: that in it the words and the verse preceded from the tone and the melody, just as amorous gesture was an abridgment into more measured and more definite mimic gesture of dance movements which were indicative in a general way and which were understandable only in the most frequent repetition. The more in the development of the human race the involuntary emotional capacity was condensed into the voluntary intellectual capacity, and the more in consequence the content of the lyric also grew from a content of feeling into a content of understanding--the more recognizably also did the verbal poem distance itself from its original connection with that primeval melody, which it still made use of in its performance only in order to convey a colder didactic content to the traditionally familiar feelings as tastefully as possible. The melody itself--as it once had blossomed forth as a necessary emotional expression from man's primeval emotive capacity and in its suitable union with word and gesture has developed to the fullness that we still perceive today in true folk melody--the reflective poets of the understanding were not able to shape, and to vary in accordance with the content of their manner of expression; still less, however, was it possible for them to be impelled by this manner of expression itself to form new melodies, because the progress of the general development in this great period of formation was precisely a progress from feeling to understanding, and the growing understanding could only feel itself hindered in its experimentation if it had somehow been pressed into the discovery of new expressions of feeling that were foreign to it.
As long as the lyric form remained one recognized and demanded by the public, therefore, the poets who had become incapable of the invention of melodies in accordance with the content of their poems, varied primarily the poems, but not the melody, which they let stand unaltered and for the sake of which they only lent to the expression of their poetic thoughts an external form that they set under the melody as a textual variation. The so excessively rich form of the Greek verbal lyric that has come down to us, and in particular also the choral songs of the tragedians, we can not explain to ourselves as necessarily determined by the content of these poems. The largely didactic and philosophic content of these poems generally stands in such vivid contradiction to the sensuous expression with respect to the excessively rich changing rhythmic structure of the verses that we cannot comprehend this so very manifold sensuous manifestation as having proceeded from the content of the poetic intention in itself, but only as having been determined by the melody and having been arranged obediently in accordance with its unalterable demands.----Still today we know the truest folk melodies only with later texts which for this or that external reason have been composed afterwards to them, to the previously existing and beloved melodies. And still today--even if on a level lower by far--French vaudeville poets especially, in composing their verses to well known melodies and in simply assigning them to the actor, follow a procedure not unlike that of the Greek lyricists and tragic poets, who without doubt composed verses to finished melodies, original to the oldest lyric and continuing to live on--namely in sacred usage--in the mouth of the people, melodies the wonderfully rich rhythmical structure of which, since we no longer know them, now astonishes us.
The true explanation of the intention of the Greek tragic poets, however, is disclosed, in content and form, by the whole course of their dramas, which indisputably moves from the womb of the lyric to reflective understanding, just as the song of the chorus flows into the still only spoken iambic discourse of the dramatic characters. What sets off these dramas for us, however, as still so gripping in their effect is precisely that lyric element which is retained in them and which recurs more strongly in the chief moments of the drama. In the application of this element the poet proceeded quite consciously, exactly like the teacher, who presented his didactic poems to the youth in the schools in lyric song that fixed the feeling. Only a deeper glance shows us that the tragic poet was less open and discursive in respect of his intention when he clothed it in lyric garments than when he unreservedly still expressed it only in spoken discourse, and in this didactic honesty but artistic insincerity the rapid decay of the Greek tragedy is grounded, in which the people soon noticed that it did not want to determine their feeling instinctively but their understanding arbitrarily. Euripides had to do bloody penance under the scourge of Aristophanesian mockery for this gross lie he revealed. That the more and more intentionally didactic poetry then had to grow into practical political rhetoric and finally even into literary prose was the most extreme but entirely natural consequence of the development of the understanding from the feeling and--in artistic expression--of speech from melody.----
That melody of whose birth we are the audience now, however, is related to that primeval maternal melody as a complete opposite, which we now, in accordance with the preceding more detailed considerations, have to characterize briefly as a progression from understanding to feeling, from verbal phrase to melody, as opposed to the progression from feeling to understanding, from melody to verbal phrase. On the route of the progression from speech in words to speech in tones we arrived at the horizontal surface of harmony, on which the verbal phrase of the poet was mirrored as musical melody. With this surface as our point of departure, how we will now master the entire content of the unfathomable depth of harmony, this womb of the archetypal relatedness of all tones, to the end of the more and more extended realization of the poetic intention and thus how we will submerge the poetic intention as a creative factor in the full depth of that primeval maternal element in such a fashion that we direct each atom of this huge chaos of feeling to a conscious, individual revelation in a compass that is nevertheless at no time restrictive but always expanding--the artistic progression, accordingly, that manifests itself in the extension of a defined conscious intention into an unending capacity for feeling that with all its immeasurability nevertheless announces itself once again exactly and definitely: this now shall be the object of our further and final presentation.----
But let us first of all specify one more thing in order to make ourselves intelligible with respect to our present-day experiences.
If we conceived the melody solely in the way we have characterized it till now, as the most extreme height of the emotional expression of speech, necessarily to be ascended by the poet, and if we saw on this height the verse already mirrored on the surface of the musical harmony, we recognize to our astonishment upon closer examination that this melody is fully the same one, as far as its appearance is concerned, that pressed upward out of the unfathomable depth of Beethoven's music to its surface, to greet the bright sunlight in the Ninth Symphony. The appearance of this melody on the surface of the harmonic sea was possible, as we saw, only because of the impulse of the musician to meet the poet eye to eye; only the verse of the poet was capable of holding it fast on the surface, on which it otherwise would have revealed itself merely as a transient appearance, to sink down rapidly again without this support into the depth of the sea. This melody was the greeting of love from the woman to the man; the encompassing "eternal feminine" here proved more loving than the egoistic masculine, for it is love itself; and only as the highest longing of love is the feminine to be comprehended, whether it reveals itself now in the man or in the woman. The beloved man still evaded the woman in this wonderful meeting: what for this woman was the highest enjoyment, imbued with sacrificial redolence, of an entire life, was for the man only a passing amorous intoxication. Only the poet whose intention we have represented here, feels himself driven with such irresistible strength to the most deeply inward wedding with the "eternal feminine" of music that in this wedding he also celebrates his redemption.
Through that melody's redeeming kiss of love the poet is now initiated into the profound endless mysteries of the feminine nature: he sees with other eyes and feels with other senses. The bottomless sea of harmony from which that blissful appearance arose to meet him is no longer an object of avoidance, fear, and aversion to him the way it previously appeared in his imagination as an unknown foreign element; not only is he now able to swim on the waves of this sea, but also--endowed with new senses--he now dives down to the very bottom. To await the arrival of her beloved the woman was impelled to leave her fearfully large parental home; now he sinks down with his betrothed and acquaints himself intimately with all the wonders of the depths. His reasonable mind penetrates everything clearly and consciously down to the original source, from which point he orders the colonnades of waves that are to mount up to the sunlight to undulate there in its gleam in rapturous billows, to splash with the sighs of the West or tower up manfully with the storms of the North; for the poet now commands the breath of the wind also--for this breath is nothing other than the breeze of endless love, of the love in the bliss of which the poet is redeemed, in the power of which he becomes the ruler of nature.
Let us now examine with a sober eye the rule of the poet who is wed to tone.----
The relational bond of the tones, whose rhythmically animated succession articulated into stresses and troughs constitutes the verse melody, clarifies itself to the feeling first in the key, which is defined by the particular scale in which the tones of that melodic succession are contained as particular steps.----We saw the poet caught up until then in the necessary effort to make the communication of his poem to the feeling possible by removing from the particularities of the expressive wealth of his organ of speech, collected and compressed from distant spheres of detail those things that were themselves heterogeneous, since he was presenting the particularities to the feeling by name also by means of rhyme, in the most representable relationship possible. Underlying this effort was an instinctive knowledge of the nature of feeling which comprehends only the unified, only the container that in its unity held the conditioned and the conditioning equally, and thus only the communicated feeling according to its generic nature. This it comprehends in such a way that the feeling is determined by the opposites contained in it not according to just this opposition, but according to the nature of the genus in which the opposites are reconciled. Understanding dissociates, feeling binds, that is, the understanding dissociates the genus into its inherent opposites, the feeling binds the opposites together again into the unified genus. This unified expression the poet finally secured most completely in the disappearance of the spoken verse, which only strove for unity, into the sung melody, which secured its unified expression, infallibly determinative of the feeling from the relationship of tones that automatically presents itself to the senses.
The key is the most tightly bound and most closely interrelated family of the entire genus of tone; it shows itself to be truly related to the whole genus of tone, however, where it progresses, through the inclination of the individual members of the tonal family, to an automatic connection with other keys. We can compare the key very fittingly here with the old patriarchal genealogical families of the human races: in these families the members were conceived in accordance with an involuntary error as special people, not as members of the whole human genus; it was the sexual love of the individual, however--which was kindled not by an accustomed but only by an unaccustomed appearance--that surmounted the confines of the patriarchal family and secured the connection to other families. Christianity announced the unity of the human race in ecstatic anticipation; the art that owed to Christianity its most characteristic development namely music, took this prophecy upon itself and shaped it into a luxuriantly rapturous revelation to the sensuous feeling as the modern language of music. If we compare those archetypal national melodies, the true family traditions of particular races, with the melody that has been made possible to us today through the progress of music in the development of Christianity, we shall find in the former as a characteristic feature that the melody almost never moves out of a definite key and appears to have grown together with it to the point of immobility: in contrast the melody possible to us has obtained an unheard of and manifold capacity by virtue of harmonic modulation, to connect its initial principal key with the most distant tonal families, so that in a larger musical composition the underlying relationship of all keys is brought before us in the light as it were, of a particular principal key.
This immeasurable power of expansion and connection so intoxicated the modern musician that, restored to sobriety once again after this intoxication, he even intentionally looked around for that more restricted family melody in order to make himself understandable by means of a simplicity that imitated it. This looking back to that patriarchal restriction shows us the true weak side of our entire music, in which we had drawn up the bill--so to speak--without the host. Starting with the root tone of harmony, music had shot up to a huge, manifold breadth in which the absolute musician, swimming around aimlessly and restlessly, finally became troubled in spirit: he saw before him nothing but an endless billowing mass of possibilities, but inside himself he grew conscious of no purpose that defined these possibilities--just as the universal humanity of Christianity also was only a blurred feeling without the point of support that alone could justify it as a distinct feeling and this point of support is the genuine human being. Thus the musician almost had to regret his huge swimming power; he longed for the quiet inlets of his primeval home again, where the water flowed calmly between narrow banks and with a current of definite direction. What moved him to this return was nothing other than the perceived aimlessness of his roaming about on the high seas, or exactly stated, the acknowledgement of possessing a capacity he was not able to use--the longing for the poet Beethoven, the boldest swimmer, announced this longing clearly; but it was not that patriarchal melody that he began to sing, but instead he also articulated to it the poet's verse. I have already called attention in another place to an important factor in this last respect to which I must return here, because it now has to serve us as a new point of support from the field of experience. That patriarchal melody--as I continue to call it to characterize its historical position--that Beethoven begins to sing in the Ninth Symphony as a melody finally found for the definition of feeling and of which I formerly asserted that it did not arise from Schiller's poem but that much more, invented outside the linguistic verse, it was only spread over this, reveals itself to us as entirely restricted to the relationships of the tonal family in which the old national folksong moved. It contains as good as no modulation at all and appears in a simplicity so characteristic of the scale that the musician's intention, as one returning to the historic source of music, speaks out in it with unashamed clarity. This intention was a necessary one for absolute music, which does not rest on the basis of the art of poetry: the musician who wishes to communicate himself to the feeling solely in tones in a clearly understandable way can do this only by lowering his endless capacity to a very restricted measure. When Beethoven noted down that melody he said:--only thus can we absolute musicians reveal ourselves intelligibly. But the course of development of everything human is not a return to the old, but progress: all return shows itself to us everywhere not as natural, but as artificial. Beethoven's return to the patriarchal melody also, like this melody itself, was an artificial one. But the mere construction of this melody was also not Beethoven's artistic goal; we see much more how he intentionally lowered his inventive power so far only for a moment in order to reach the natural foundation of music on which he could stretch out his hand to the poet but also grasp the poet's hand. As he feels the hand of the poet in his own with this simple, confined melody, he now strides forward on the poem and out of this poem shaping in accordance with its spirit and its form to ever bolder and more manifold tonal construction, so that finally marvels arise before us from the power of poetic tonal speech--marvels such as we previously never even suspected, marvels like "Seid umschlungen, Millionen!", "Ahnest du den Schöpfer, Welt?", and finally the securely intelligible concord of the "Seid umschlungen" with the "Freude, schöne Götterfunken!" If we now compare the broad melodic structure in the musical realization of the whole verse "Seid umschlungen" with the melody that the master only spread out, so to speak, from the means of absolute music over the verse "Freude, schöne Götterfunken," we will then obtain an exact understanding of the difference between the patriarchal melody--as I called it--and the melody growing up over the linguistic verse out of the poetic intention. Just as the former revealed itself clearly only in the most restricted relationships of the tonal family, so the latter--and indeed not only without becoming unintelligible but precisely to be then truly intelligible to the feeling--is able to extend the narrower relatedness of the key through its connection with keys once again related into the underlying relatedness of tones in general, while it enlarges in this way the securely conducted feeling into the infinite, purely human feeling.--
The key of a melody is that which first of all presents the various tones contained in it to the feeling in a bond of relatedness. The impulse to widen this narrow bond to a more extended and ample one derives still from the poetic intention, in so far as it has already condensed into a factor of feeling in the verse and indeed in accordance with the character of the particular expression of individual principal tones, which have been determined precisely on the basis of the verse. These principal tones are in a certain measure the youthful growing members of the family, who long for an unguided independence from the accustomed family environment: they secure this independence, however, not as egoists, but through contact with some other person, some one situated precisely outside of the family. The maiden achieves an independent departure from the family only through the love of youth, who as the offspring of another family draws the maiden to him. In this way the tone that steps out of the circle of the key is already a tone drawn by another key and determined by it, and it must therefore flow out into this key according to the necessary law of love. The leading tone pressing from one key to another, which through this pressure alone already reveals its relationship with this key, can only be thought of as determined by the motive of love. The motive of love is that which presses forth from the subject and forces this subject into connection with another. In the individual tone this motive can arise only from a context that defines it as particular; but the defining context of the melody lies in the sensuous expression of the verbal phrase, which in its turn was first determined by the sense of this phrase. If we consider this more exactly we shall discern that the same determination is definitive here that already connected differently situated feelings to each other in the alliterative verse.
The alliterative verse, as we saw, already connected speech roots of opposed emotional expression in sensuous hearing (like "Lust und Leid" [pleasure and pain], "Wohl und Weh" [weal and woe]) and presented them to the feeling as generically related. On a higher level of expression by far, musical modulation is now able to make such a connection intuitive to feeling. If we take, for example, an alliterative verse of completely unchanging emotional content, like "Liebe giebt Lust zum Leben [Love gives light to life," the musician would also receive here, just as in the alliterative roots of the accents the same feeling revealed itself sensuously, no natural impulse to depart from the key originally chosen, but instead he would define the rise and fall of the tone for the feeling with complete sufficiency within the same key. If we contrast with this a verse of mixed feeling, like "Die Liebe bringt Lust und Leid" [Love brings pleasure and pain], the musician would feel impelled here, just as the alliterative verse connects two opposed feelings, also to change over from the key first sounded, that corresponds to the first feeling, to a second key corresponding to the second feeling, which is defined according to its relationship to the feeling of the first key. The word "Lust," which as the highest intensification of the first feeling seems to press towards the second, would have to receive a totally different emphasis in this phrase than in the former, "Die Liebe giebt Lust zum Leben"; the tone sung to it would involuntarily become the determining leading tone that pressed urgently towards the other key, in which the "Leid" was to be announced. In this disposition towards one another, "Lust und Leid" would become a disclosure of a particular feeling the peculiarity of which lay precisely in the point where two opposed feelings represented themselves as conditioning each other and thus as necessarily belonging to each other, as actually related; and this disclosure is made possible only in music, in accordance with its capacity of harmonic modulation, because on the strength of this it exercises a binding compulsion on sensuous feeling for which no other art possesses the power.--But let us first of all see in addition how musical modulation in common with the content of the verse is able to lead back again to the first feeling.--If after "die Liebe bringt Lust und Leid" we allow to follow as a second verse "doch in ihr Weh auch webt sie Wonnen" [yet in its plaint also plaits pleasure], then webt" [plaits] would now become the leading tone to the first key, just as the second feeling returns from here to the first again, which is now enriched--a return that the poet could represent to the sensuous emotive perception by virtue of the alliterative verse only as a progress of the feeling of "Weh" into that of "Wonnen," but not as a termination of the emotional genus "Liebe," while the musician becomes perfectly understandable precisely through the fact that he quite noticeably goes back to the first key and therefore designates the generic feeling definitely as a unified one, which was not possible to the poet, who had to change the sound of the root in the alliterative verse.--But the poet indicated the generic feeling by the sense of both verses: he accordingly required its realization before the feeling and destined the realizing musician for his procedure. The justification for his procedure, that as an absolute one would appear arbitrary and unintelligible to us, the musician therefore receives from the intention of the poet--from an intention that the latter could really only indicate or at most approximately realize only for fractions of his proclamation (precisely in the alliteration), but the full realization of which is possible certainly only to the musician, and indeed through the ability to use the underlying original relatedness of tones for a completely unified disclosure of fundamentally unified feelings to the emotional faculty.
How immeasurably great this ability is we can most easily conceive if we imagine the sense of the two verses adduced above to be still more distinctly set forth in such a manner that between the progression away from the one feeling and the soon consummated return to it in the second verse a quite lengthy series of verses expressed the most manifold intensification and mixture of feelings lying in between, in part strengthening and in part appeasing, up to the final return to the principal feeling. Here the musical modulation, in order to realize the poetic intention, would have to lead into and back from the most various keys; all the keys touched on, however, would appear in an exact familial relationship to the original key, by which the special light they cast on the expression is indeed qualified and the capacity for this illumination in a certain measure even first bestowed. The principal key, as the fundamental tone of the feeling that is sounded, would manifest in itself an original relatedness to all keys, and consequently, by virtue of its expression, make the appointed feeling known during its utterance in an intensity and extension such that only what was related to it could specify our emotion, such that our general emotional capacity would be filled solely by this feeling by virtue of its increased extension, and such that this single feeling would accordingly be elevated to an all-encompassing, universally human, and infallibly intelligible one.
If the poetic-musical period has herewith been characterized as it is defined in accordance with a principal key, then we can provisionally characterize that work of art as the one most perfect for expression in which many such periods are represented in the greatest fullness in such a way that one is conditional upon the other and they develop into a rich collective revelation in which the nature of man in a major decisive direction, that is, in a direction that is able to comprehend human nature in itself completely (just as a principal key is able to comprehend in itself all other keys), is presented to the feeling with the greatest certainty and tangibility. This work of art is the perfected drama in which that comprehensive direction of human nature, in a consequential and highly self-determining series of emotive phases, discloses itself to the feeling with such strength and power of conviction that, as the necessary and most distinct expression of the emotive content of the phases, which are now intensified to a comprehensive collective motif, the action proceeds from this abundance of conditions as the final factor, involuntarily demanded and therefore perfectly understood.--
Before we draw further conclusions from the character of the poetic-musical melodic period about the drama as it has to grow out of the correlatively self-conditioning development of many necessary periods of this kind, we must still first define that factor which also conditions the individual melodic periods in their emotive expression by the capacity of pure music and which is to place at our disposal the immense compelling organ through whose most characteristic aid we can first make possible the perfected drama. This organ will accrue to us from--as I have already called it--the vertical extensity of harmony (there where it moves upward from its foundation), when we bestow upon harmony itself the possibility of its fullest sympathetic cooperation in the whole work of art.
Up to now we have established the conditions for melodic progression from one key to another as lying in the poetic intention, so far as this itself had manifested its emotive content and with this demonstration we have proven(1) that the impelling basis of melodic motion, as justified also before the feeling, can arise only from this intention. What alone makes possible this progression, which is necessary to the poet, lies naturally not in the realm of speech in words, however, but instead very definitely only in music. It is harmony, this most specific element of music, that is still conditioned by the poetic intention only in so far as it is that other, feminine element, into which this intention flows over for its realization, for its salvation. For this is the procreative element, which takes up the poetic intention only as a creative seed in order to form it into a finished manifestation in accordance with the most specific conditions of its feminine organism. This organism is a special, individual one, and indeed precisely not a creative one, but a procreative: it received from the poet the fertilizing seed, but it ripens and shapes the fruit in accordance with its peculiar individual capacity.
The melody as it appears on the upper surface of the harmony is conditioned in its decisive purely musical expression solely by the harmonic foundation that acts from below: just as it displays itself as a horizontal succession, it is connected with this foundation by means of a vertical chain. This chain is the harmonic chord, which rises from the fundamental tone to the surface as a vertical series of the most closely related tones. The accompanying sound of this chord first gives the melodic tone the special significance in accordance with which it was used as uniquely characteristic for a distinct moment of the expression. Just as the chord that is defined by the fundamental tone first gives to the individual melodic tone its particular expression--since one and the same tone over a fundamental tone differently related to it receives a totally different significance for the expression--so each melodic progression from one key to another defines itself in the same way only in accordance with the changing fundamental tone, which in itself occasions the harmonic leading tone as such. The presence of this fundamental tone and the harmonic chord determined by it is indispensable to the feeling that the melody in its characteristic expression is to lay hold of. But the presence of the fundamental harmony is its concomitant sounding. Only this accompaniment of the melody by the harmony convinces the feeling completely of the emotive content of the melody, which without this accompaniment would allow to the feeling something undefined; but only with the fullest clarity of all the components of the expression does the feeling also clarify itself rapidly and directly into involuntary participation, and full clarity of the expression is once again, however, only the most complete communication of all its essential components to the senses.
The hearing thus demands imperiously also the accompaniment of the melody by the harmony, because only through this accompaniment does it completely fulfill its receptive sensory capacity, keep it satisfied, and therefore is able to turn itself with the necessary calmness to the well defined emotive expression of the melody. The accompaniment of the melody by the harmony is therefore not a weighing down, but instead the single enabling facilitation of the ear's understanding. Only when the harmony is not able to express itself as melody--when the melody accordingly has received its justification neither from dance rhythm nor from linguistic verse, but instead without this justification, which alone can qualify it for the feeling as perceivable, announced itself only as a contingent appearance on the upper surface of the chords of arbitrarily changing fundamental tones--only then would the feeling, without a defining point of support, become disturbed by the naked proclamation of the harmony because this brought to it only excitations but not the satisfaction of what was excited.
Our modern music has to a certain extent developed out of naked harmony. It has determined itself in accordance with the infinite abundance of possibilities that presented themselves through the interchange of fundamental tones and of the chords that were derived from them. To the degree that it remained entirely true to this origin, it also acted on the feeling only in a narcotic and bewildering way, and its most colorful revelations have in this sense offered enjoyment only to a certain revelry of the musical understanding, but not to the musically unintelligent laity. The layman, as soon as he did not pretend to musical understanding, thus solely adhered merely to the most superficial surface of the melody as it was conducted to him in the purely sensuous(2) charm of the organ of song; while he called out by way of contrast to the absolute musician: "I do not understand your music, it is too learned for me."--In opposition to this, there is no question at all in the case of harmony--in the way it is to sound an accompaniment as a purely musically directive foundation of the poetic melody--of an understanding in the sense in which it is now understood by the specialized learned musician and not understood by the layman: to its activity as harmony the attention of the feeling does not have to be directed at all during the performance of that melody, but rather just as harmony itself would silently cause the characteristic expression of the melody but through its silence would only have to impede endlessly the understanding of this expression, indeed would have to make it accessible to the musically learned alone, who would have to add it mentally--so the sounding accompaniment of harmony is to make an abstract and distracting activity of the artistic musical understanding precisely unnecessary, and to conduct to the feeling the melody's musical content of emotion as an instinctively recognizable one to be grasped without any distracting effort so that it is easily and rapidly comprehensible.
If formerly the musician thus constructed his music, so to speak, out of harmony, then now the poet in tone will additionally fit to the melody that is occasioned by the linguistic verse the other necessary, purely musical condition, which however is already contained in it as accompanying harmony, only as though to make it discernible. In the melody of the poet the harmony is already included, only as though unuttered: totally unnoticed, it qualified the expressive significance of the tones that the poet disposed for the melody. This expressive significance that the poet unconsciously had in his ear was already the fulfilled condition, the most easily recognizable manifestation of the harmony; but this manifestation was for him only an imagined one, still not a sensuously perceptible one. Yet he communicates to the senses for his salvation, to the immediately receptive organs of the feeling, and to them he must therefore convey the melodic manifestation of the harmony with the conditions of this manifestation, for only that is an organic work of art which encloses in itself and communicates to the most distinct perception the conditioning together with the conditioned. The previous, absolute music presented harmonic conditions; the poet would communicate only the conditioned in his melody, and therefore would remain just as unintelligible as his predecessor if he did not proclaim completely to the hearing the harmonic conditions of the melody that was justified by the linguistic verse.
Harmony, however, could be invented only by the musician, not by the poet. The melody that we saw the poet invent from the linguistic verse, as a harmonically conditioned one, was therefore one more found by him than invented [more gefundene than erfundene]. The conditions of this musical melody first had to be present before the poet could find it as a duly conditioned one. The musician had already conditioned this melody on the basis of his most characteristic capacity before the poet could find it for his salvation: he conveyed it to the poet as a harmonically justified one, and only melody as it is made possible by the nature of modern music is the melody that redeems the poet, both provoking and satisfying his urgent impulse.
Poet and musician resemble two travellers in this respect, who have left from one point of departure, restlessly striding directly forward from there, each in the opposite direction. At the opposite point of the earth they meet each other again; each has wandered around the planet halfway. They interrogate each other and the one imparts to the other what he has seen and found. The poet tells of the plains, mountains, valleys, meadows, people, and animals that he came upon in his long trip through the continents. The musician strode through the seas, and reports on the wonders of the ocean, in which many times he was close to being swallowed up, and whose depths and monstrous shapes filled him with voluptuous horror. Stimulated and irresistibly determined to get to know equally the things other than those they saw themselves so that they may turn the impression received only in idea and imagination into actual experience, both now separate once again, each to complete his journey around the earth. At their first point of departure they thus finally meet again; the poet has now also swum through the seas, the musician stridden through the continents. Now they will part no more, for both now know the earth: what they formerly thought in portentous dreams to be configured in such and such a way has now become known to them in its actuality. They are at one; for each knows and feels what the other knows and feels. The poet has become a musician, the musician a poet: now they both are the complete artistic human being.
At the point of their first meeting, after the trip around the first half of the earth, the conversation between poet and musician was that melody which we now have in view--the melody whose utterance the poet shaped from his innermost longing, but whose proclamation the musician stipulated from his experience. When both pressed each other's hands in the new farewell, each of them had in mind what he himself had still not experienced, and precisely for the sake of this convincing experience they parted once more.- -Let us first consider the poet, how he masters the experiences of the musician, which he now experiences himself, but guided by the advice of the musician, who has already sailed through the seas on his bold ship, found the way to the mainland, and imparted the secure routes exactly to him. On this new trip we shall see that the poet becomes wholly the same person that the musician becomes on his trip, traced out for him by the poet over the other half of the globe, so that both trips now are to be regarded as one and the same.
When the poet now sets out into the vast reaches of harmony to secure in them something like a demonstration of the truth of the melody "told" to him by the musician, he no longer finds the pathless tonal wilderness that the musician came upon to begin with on his first trip; but instead, to his delight, he encounters the wonderfully bold, strangely new frame, joined with infinite subtlety and yet immense security, of the seagoing vessel which that ocean traveler created for himself and which the poet now bestrides, to begin securely on it his journey through the waves. The musician had taught him the touch and handling of the rudder; the character of the sail, and all the strangely and ingeniously discovered necessities for a secure voyage in wind and storm. At the rudder of this ship that sails majestically through the high waters, the poet, who before painfully measured out mountain and valley step by step, becomes aware with delight of man's omnipotent power; from his high shipboard the still so mightily rolling waves seem to him willing and faithful bearers of his noble destiny, this destiny of the poetic intention. This ship is the potently enabling instrument of his most extensive and mightiest will; with ardently thankful love he thinks of the musician, who devised it in the deep distress of the sea and now gives it over into his hands:--for this ship securely bearing him is the master of the endless tides of harmony, the orchestra.
Harmony in itself is only an object of thought: it first becomes actually perceivable to the senses as polyphony, or still more definitely as polyphonic symphony.
The first and natural symphony is presented by the harmonic consonance of a homogeneous polyphonic tonal sound. The most natural tonal sound is the human voice, which reveals itself in accordance with sex, age, and the individual peculiarity of vocally gifted people in different kinds of range and in manifold tone colors, and through the harmonic cooperation of these individualities becomes the most natural proclaimer of the polyphonic symphony. Christian religious lyric discovered this symphony: in it diverse humanity appeared unified in an expression of feeling the object of which was not individual longing as the manifestation of a personality, but instead the individual longing of the personality as infinitely intensified by the manifestation of exactly the same longing of a wholly equally necessitous community; and this longing was the yearning for resolution in God, the highest power, personified in the imagination, of the longing, individual personality itself, which took courage, so to speak, for this intensification of the potency of a personality felt to be futile in itself through the same longing of a community and through the most inward harmonic fusion with this community, as though to draw the strength that escaped the futile individual personality from a similarly directed common capability. The mystery of this longing, however, was to be revealed in the course of development of Christian humanity, and indeed as its purely individually personal content. As a purely individual personality, however, man no longer attaches his longing to God, as something only conceived, but instead he actualizes the object of his longing in something material and sensuously present, the acquisition and enjoyment of which is to be made practically possible to him. With the extinction of the purely religious spirit of Christianity there vanished also a necessary significance of polyphonic church song and with it the characteristic form of its manifestation. Counterpoint, as the first stirring of the pure individualism more and more clearly to be enunciated, began to gnaw away the simply symphonic vocal web with sharp, mordant teeth, and made it more and more visibly into an artistic harmony of inwardly disagreeing, individual announcements that was often still to be preserved only with difficulty.--Finally in the opera the individual freed himself completely from the vocal association to reveal himself as a pure personality entirely unhindered, alone, and independent. Where dramatic personages entered into polyphonic song, this happened--in the true operatic style--for the sensuously effective intensification of the individual expression, or--in the true dramatic style--as simultaneous revelation, mediated by the highest art, of characteristic individualities continuously asserting themselves.
If we now hold up to view the drama of the future as we have to imagine it to ourselves as the realization of the poetic intention we defined, we shall nowhere perceive in it a place for the disposition of individualities of so subordinate a relation to the drama that they could be utilized for the purpose of making the harmony perceptible polyphonically through a merely musically accordant cooperation in the melody of the main character. With the density and intensification of the motives as well as the actions, only participants in the action can be thought of who exert a decisive influence on this at every moment through their necessary, individual pronouncement--only personalities, namely, who on the contrary require a polyphonic symphonic support for the musical proclamation of their individuality, that is for the clarification of their melody, but by no means--except in cases that appear only rarely, are completely justified, and are necessary for the highest understanding--can serve for the mere harmonic justification of the melody of another person.--Even the chorus used previously in the opera, in the significance that was there conferred upon it even in the most favorable cases, will have to disappear in our drama; it also is only of vitally convincing effect in the drama when it is completely deprived of its merely massive proclamation. A mass can never interest us, but instead simply disconcert us: only exactly distinguishable individualities can capture our sympathy. Also the more numerous surrounding society, there where it is needed to attach the character of individual interest to the motives and actions of the drama, is the necessary concern of the poet, who everywhere struggles for the clearest intelligibility of his organizational arrangements: he will hide nothing, but rather reveal everything. He wants to disclose to the feeling to which he addresses himself the entire active organism of a human action, and he will achieve this only when he presents this organism to it throughout in the warmest, most spontaneous demonstration of its parts. The human environment of a dramatic action must appear to us as if this particular action and the persons caught up in it present themselves to us as standing forth from the environment only because in their connection with this environment they are shown to us exactly in the one aspect turned towards the viewer and in the illumination of exactly this light now falling in just such a way. But our feeling must be so determined in this environment that we can not be offended by the assumption that if we considered the arena of action in another aspect and illuminated by another light, an action and the persons caught up in it would have entirely the same strength and capacity to arouse sympathy. The environment, in other words, must present itself to our feeling in such a fashion that we can ascribe to each segment of it among the others, as the circumstances now only defined in exactly such a way, the capacity for motives and actions that would compel our sympathy with the same force as those first exposed to our consideration at the present moment. That which the poet places in the background recedes only with respect to the necessary station point of the viewer, who would not be able to survey an action too elaborately articulated and towards whom the poet therefore turns only the one, easily comprehensible physiognomy of the object to be represented.--To convert the environment exclusively into a lyrical factor would necessarily be to undervalue it in the drama since this procedure must at the same time assign lyricism itself to an entirely false position in the drama. In the drama of the future--the work of the poet who communicates himself through the understanding to the feeling--lyrical outpouring is to grow out of the motives that are condensed before our eyes, but not to spread out unmotivated at the outset. The poet of this drama does not wish to progress from feeling to its justification, but rather to give the very feeling that has been justified by understanding: this justification takes place before our feeling itself, and determines itself from the will of the characters to the involuntarily necessary must, that is, to the actual can; the moment of the realization of this will through the involuntary must to the can is the lyrical outpouring in its greatest force as the discharge into the deed. The lyrical component thus has to grow out of the drama, to qualify itself from it as necessarily appearing. Thus the dramatic environment cannot appear unconditionally in the clothing of lyricism, as was the case in our opera, but instead it too has first to intensify itself to lyricism, and indeed through its participation in the action, of which it has to convince us not as a lyrical mass but rather as the well distinguished articulation of independent individuals.
Not the so-called chorus, therefore, and also not the principal characters themselves, are to be used by the poet as a musically concording tonal body to make the harmonic qualifications of the melody perceptible. In the blossoming of the lyrical outpouring with the fully occasioned participation of all characters and their companions in a common expression of feeling there alone offers itself to the tonal poet the polyphonic vocal substance he can entrust with rendering the harmony perceptible: yet here too it will remain the necessary task of the tonal poet to reveal the participation of the dramatic individualities in the outpouring of feeling not as a mere harmonic supporting of the melody, but rather--and precisely also in the harmonic concordance--to allow the individuality of the participants to make itself known in a definite and again melodic pronouncement; and exactly in this will his highest power, granted to him by the situation of our musical art manifest itself. The situation of our independently developed modern art, however, also conveys to him the immeasurably competent organ for making harmony perceptible, which along with the satisfaction of simple need, at the same time possesses in itself the capacity of characterization of melody such as was entirely denied to the harmonizing vocal substance, and this organ is precisely the orchestra.
The orchestra we now have to consider not only the way I designated it before, as the master of the floods of harmony, but rather as the mastered flood of harmony itself. In it the element of harmony, which qualifies the melody, is transformed from a factor that merely makes this qualification perceptible, into a characteristic, extremely cooperative organ for the realization of the poetic intention. From something only imagined by the poet for its own sake and not to be actualized in the drama by the same vocal mass of tone in which the melody appears, naked harmony becomes in the orchestra an entirely concrete and particularly influential entity through whose help the perfected drama is first truly made possible to the poet.
The orchestra is the actualized thought of harmony in the highest, most vital mobility. It is the condensation of the members of the vertical chord into the independent proclamation of their relational tendencies in a horizontal direction, along which they extend themselves with the freest facility of motion--with a facility of motion that has been bestowed upon the orchestra by its creator, the rhythm of dance.--
Here we must first of all take note of the important fact that the instrumental orchestra is something entirely distinct from and other than the vocal tonal mass not only in its power of expression but also very definitely in its tone color. The musical instrument is to a certain extent an echo of the human voice, with a constitution such that we still perceive in it only the vowel dissolved into musical tone but no longer the consonant that defines the word. In this detachment from the word the instrumental tone resembles that primeval tone of human speech which only with the consonant condensed itself into the actual vowel, and in its connections--as opposed to today's speech in words--becomes a special language that still has only a relationship of feeling, but not of understanding, to actual human speech. Now this pure tonal speech, completely detached from the word, or remaining distant from the consonantal development of our speech, has secured in the individuality of the instruments, on the other hand, by means of which alone it was to be spoken, a special individual peculiarity that is defined by the consonant character, so to speak, of the instrument much like speech in words is by the consonant consonants. We could designate a musical instrument in its defining influence on the peculiarity of the tone to be announced by it as the consonant initial rootlike sound, which represents itself for all the tones to be made possible on it as the uniting alliteration. The relatedness of instruments among themselves would very easily permit a definition in accordance with the similarity of the initial sound, which according to circumstances might reveal itself almost as a softer or harder pronunciation of the same consonant originally held in common. We possess in fact instrumental families to which an originally equivalent initial sound is proper, which is simply graduated according to the varied character of the family members, as the consonants "p," "b," and "v," are, for example, in verbal language. And just as in the case of "v" we again come upon the similarity to "f," so the relatedness of the instrumental families might easily be sought throughout a highly ramified range whose exact articulation, like the characteristic utilization of family members in their combination according to similarity or difference, the orchestra would have to bring before us in accordance with a still far more individual power of speech than is manifest even now, for the orchestra in its meaningful idiosyncrasy has still not nearly been recognized sufficiently. But this recognition indeed can come about for us only when we assign to the orchestra a more intimate participation in the drama than has formerly been the case, when it has largely been utilized only for luxurious decoration.
The peculiarity of the orchestra's power of speech, which must result from its sensuous idiosyncrasy, we reserve for a final consideration of the efficacy of the orchestra. In order to arrive at this consideration with the necessary preparation, it suffices for the present to confirm above all one thing; the total difference of the orchestra in its purely sensuous manifestation from the likewise purely sensuous manifestation of tile tonal substance of the voice. The orchestra is distinguished from this vocal tonal substance in the same way that the just designated instrumental consonant--and thus the sounding tone qualified or determined by it--is distinguished from the linguistic consonant and its sounding tone. The consonant of the instrument defines once and for all every tone to be brought forth on the instrument, while the vocal tone of speech, even if only because of the changing initial sound, receives an always different, endlessly manifold coloring by virtue of which the tonal organ of the speaking voice is certainly the richest and most perfect one, that is, the most organically qualified one, as opposed to which the most manifold mixture conceivable of orchestral tone colors must appear pitifully poor--an experience that to be sure cannot be had by those who hear the human voice employed by our modern singers for the imitation of an orchestral instrument with the elimination of all the consonants and the retention of only whatever single vowel is desired, and who therefore handle this voice again as an instrument in that they perform, for example, duets between a soprano and a clarinet, or a tenor and a French horn.
If we wanted to leave entirely out of consideration that the singer we mean is an artistic human being who represents human beings and who arranges the artistic outpourings of his feeling in accordance with the highest necessity of the human incarnation of the idea, then the purely sensuous disclosure of the tone of his singing speech in its endless individual diversity as this proceeds from the characteristic fluctuation of the consonants and vowels would already represent not only a by far richer tonal organ than the orchestral instrument but also one totally different from it; and this difference of the sensuous tonal organ determines also once and for all the whole position that the orchestra has to assume with respect to the performing singer. The orchestra has to make perceptible the tone and then the melody and the characteristic delivery of the singer primarily as something well settled and justified by the inner realm of harmony. This ability the orchestra secures as a harmonic tonal body that is separated from the vocal tone and the melody of the singer, and that freely and for the sake of its own proclamation, which is to be justified as independent, subordinates itself to him sympathetically, but never by means of the attempt at an actual mixture with the vocal tone. When we have a melody which is sung by the human voice accompanied in such a way that the essential constituent of the harmony which lies in the intervals of the melody remains omitted from the harmonic sonority of the instrumental accompaniment and is to be completed, so to speak, by the melody of the singing voice, we shall become aware instantly that the harmony is precisely incomplete and the melody for this reason precisely not completely justified harmonically, because our ear involuntarily perceives the human voice, in its great difference from the sensuous tone color of the instruments, as separated from these, and thus receives as what is conveyed only two different components, a melody incompletely justified harmonically, and an incomplete harmonic accompaniment. This usually important and still never consequently heeded perception can enlighten us about a large part of the ineffectiveness of our previous opera melody and teach us about the manifold errors into which we have fallen concerning the formation of vocal melody with respect to the orchestra; and this is exactly the place at which we have to provide ourselves with this teaching.
Absolute melody, as we have applied it previously in the opera and which we--in the absence of an occasion for it in a linguistic verse necessarily forming itself into melody-- constructed imitatively by variation through the pure musical consideration of folksong melodies and dance melodies long familiar to us, was always a melody, exactly regarded, that was carried over from instruments to the singing voice. In this we have always thought of the human voice, in an involuntary error, as an orchestral instrument that simply was to be treated with special concern, and as such we have also interwoven it with the orchestral accompaniment This interweaving soon took place in the fashion I have already adduced, namely so that the human voice was used as an essential constituent of the instrumental harmony--but soon also in a manner such that the instrumental accompaniment presented the harmonically supplementary melody also, by which means, to be sure, the orchestra was completed as an intelligible whole, but in this self-containment, at the same time also revealed the character of the melody as one exclusively characteristic of instrumental music. By the complete adoption of the melody into the orchestra, which was found necessary, the musician acknowledged that this melody was such that just as it was thoroughly harmonically justified only by the very same tonal mass, so it was to be intelligible performed also by this mass alone. In the performance of the melody by this harmonically and melodically completely self-contained tonal body the singing voice basically appeared to be thoroughly superfluous and to be unnaturally set on top of it as a second disfiguring head. The listener felt this mismatch quite involuntarily: he did not understand the melody until he heard it--free from the changing consonants and vowels of speech, which interfered with this melody and which made him uneasy in the apprehension of absolute melody-- performed only by instruments alone. That our most fashionable opera melodies were first really understood by the public when they were also performed for the public by the orchestra--as in concerts and in the changing of the guard or as played on a harmonic instrument--and first became familiar to it when it could repeat them without words: this obvious circumstance should have enlightened us long since concerning the totally false conception of vocal melody in opera. This melody was a vocal melody only in so far as it had been assigned to the human voice for performance in accordance with its purely instrumental character--a character in the unfolding of which it was noticeably damaged by the consonants and vowels of the words and for the sake of which the art of singing also consequentially underwent a development that we nowadays see as having arrived, with modern opera singers, at its most unashamed wordless height.
But this mismatch between the tone color of the orchestra and that of the human voice became most strikingly apparent where serious musical masters struggled towards a characteristic manifestation of dramatic melody. While they still involuntarily had in their ear always only that instrumental melody just designated as the single bond of the purely musical intelligibility of their motifs, they sought to define exactly for them a specific sensible expression through an uncommonly artificial accompaniment by the instruments, harmonically and rhythmically accentuated and extending from note to note, from word to word, and they arrived in this way at the construction of musical periods in which, the more carefully the instrumental accompaniment was interwoven with the motif of the human voice, the more this voice, for the involuntarily separating hearing, disclosed in itself an incomprehensible melody, the conditions for the intelligibility of which were present in an accompaniment that again, involuntarily separated from the voice, remained in itself an unexplained chaos for the ear. The underlying mistake here was accordingly a double one. First: failure to recognize the determining nature of poetic vocal melody, which was dragged in as absolute melody from instrumental music; and secondly: failure to recognize the full difference of the tone color(3) of the human voice from that of orchestral instruments, with which the human voice was mixed for the sake of purely musical demands.
If it is now intended here to point out the character of vocal melody clearly, then this will occur if we distinctly bring it to mind once again as having proceeded not only intellectually but also sensuously from the verse and as conditioned by it. Its source in respect of sense lies in the nature of the poetic intention, which strives for understanding by way of feeling, and in respect of sensuous manifestation in the organ of the understanding, speech in words. From this conditioning source, in its development up to the announcement of the pure emotional content of the verse by virtue of the dissolution of the vowel in the musical tone, it strides forth to the point where with its purely musical side it faces towards the characteristic element of music from which this side uniquely receives the qualification that makes its manifestation possible, while it has the other side of its total manifestation turned steadily towards the meaningful element of verbal language, by which it was originally qualified. In this position the melody of the verse becomes the bond of connection and understanding between the verbal and the tonal languages, as the offspring of the marriage of poetry to music, as the incarnated element of the love of the two arts. At the same time, however, it is also more and stands higher than the verse of poetic art and the absolute melody of music, and its appearance, which provides deliverance on both sides just as it is determined from both sides, becomes possible to the salvation of both arts only when both simply reinforce and constantly justify their individually independent manifestation as such-- which in both is plastic, and carried by the conditioning elements, but quite distinct--but never efface their plastic individuality through an overflowing mixture with it.
If we now desire to make the correct relationship of this melody to the orchestra clearly perceptible, we can do so in the following image.
We compared the orchestra earlier, as the master of the floods of harmony, to a sea-going vessel: this was done in the sense in which we equate "ocean voyage" and "ship voyage" as the same in meaning. The orchestra as mastered harmony, as we then also had to call it, we may now regard, for the sake of a new, independent comparison,(4) in contrast to the ocean, as a clear mountain lake, deep, but nevertheless illuminated by sunlight down to the bottom, whose surrounding shore is clearly recognizable from every point of the lake.--From the tree trunks that grew from the strong, primeval, alluvial soil of the heights the boat was now hewn which, bound fast with iron braces and well supplied with rudder and oars, was put together in respect of shape and character precisely with the intent of having it borne by the lake and able to cut through it. This boat, set on the back of the lake, moved ahead by the stroke of the oars, and led in the direction of the helm is the verse melody of the dramatic singer borne by the sonorous waves of the orchestra. The boat is something thoroughly different from the surface of the lake and yet uniquely framed and put together only with regard to the water and with an exact consideration of its properties; on land the boat is completely unusable, or at most useful after its separation into ordinary planks as fuel for the domestic kitchen hearth. Only on the lake does it become blissfully alive, borne and yet progressing, moved and nevertheless always resting, which when it roves over the lake draws our eye to it again and again like an intention that presents itself in human terms of the being of the lake, which billows and previously appeared aimless to us.--Yet the boat does not rove on top of the surface of the mirror of the water: the lake can only carry it in a sure direction if the part of its body that is turned directly towards the water sinks into it. A thin board that touches only the upper surface of the lake is thrown hither and thither without direction by its waves according to whichever way they are running, while on the other hand a heavy stone necessarily sinks down into it. But not only the side of the boat's body that directly faces the lake sinks into it; rather the rudder also, with which its direction is determined, and the oars, which provide motion in this direction, receive this determining and impelling force only through their contact with the water, a contact that first makes possible the effective pressure of the guiding hand. With each forward-driving motion the oars cut deeply into the sounding surface of the water; raised out of it, they allow the liquid clinging to them to run back again in melodic drops.
I do not need to explain this comparison in more detail in order to make myself understandable concerning the relationship in the contact of the verbal-tonal melody of the human voice with the orchestra, for this relationship is represented in the comparison with complete adequacy,--which will become evident to us still more exactly if we designate the actual opera melody familiar to us as the fruitless attempt of the musician to compress the waves of the lake themselves into a supporting boat.
We now still have to consider the orchestra as an independent element, in itself different from any verse melody, and to ascertain its capacity to support this melody, like the lake supported the boat; not only by making perceptible--from a purely musical standpoint--the harmony qualifying it, but rather also by means of its characteristic, endlessly expressive power of speech.
The orchestra undeniably possesses a capacity of speech, and the creations of our modern instrumental music have revealed this to us. We have seen, in the symphonies of Beethoven, this capacity of speech develop to a height at which it felt itself forced to utter even that which in its nature, however, it really can not utter. Now, when in the melody of the verse we have brought before it exactly that which it could not utter and indicated to it as the bearer of this melody that is related to it the activity in which it-- completely calmed--is still to utter only just what in its nature it uniquely can utter,--we have to characterize this orchestral capacity of speech clearly in that it is the capacity of disclosing the unutterable.
This characterization is not intended to express something merely imagined but rather something actual, something obvious.
We saw that the orchestra is not in some way a complex of entirely similar, vague tonal capacities, but rather that it consists of an association--susceptible of immeasurably rich expansion--of instruments which as entirely distinct individualities define the tone to be brought forth on them likewise as an individual manifestation. A tonal agglomerate without any such individual definition of its members is simply not present and can at most be imagined, but never realized. But that which defines this individuality is--as we have seen-- the special peculiarity of the individual instrument which by means of its initial consonant sound specifies the vowel, as it were, of the tone produced as a particular, distinct one. Now just as this initial consonant sound never raises itself to the level of the meaningful significance--which is specified by the discernment of the feeling--of the consonant of language, nor is capable either, as this is, of fluctuation and a consequently fluctuating influence on the vowel, so the tonal speech of an instrument cannot possibly condense itself into an expression that is achievable only by the organ of the understanding, verbal language; it articulates instead, as the pure organ of the feeling, exactly that which is unutterable by human language itself and is accordingly, regarded from the standpoint of our human understanding, the unutterable. That this unutterable is not an unutterable in itself but precisely an unutterable only for the organ of our understanding, and thus not something merely imagined but something actual: this indeed the instruments of the orchestra reveal with quite perfect distinctness in that each one of them articulates it clearly and intelligibly in itself, but in an infinitely more manifold way through the varied effect of its union with other instruments.(5)
Let us now fix our gaze first of all on the unutterable that the orchestra is able to express with the greatest definiteness, and in combination, what is more, with another unutterable--with gesture.
Corporeal gesture, revealing itself as determined by an inner sentiment in the meaningful movement of the bodily members most capable of expression and ultimately of the facial attitudes, is something completely unutterable insofar as language is only able to describe it to interpret it while only just those limbs or those attitudes could really utter it. Something that verbal language can communicate perfectly, an object to be communicated, that is, from understanding to understanding, does not require an accompaniment or an intensification by gesture at all; indeed the unnecessary gesture could only disturb the communication. In such a communication, as we saw earlier, the sensuously receptive organ of hearing is also not excited, however, but serves instead only as a non-participating intermediary. But the communication of an object that verbal language can not convey with full conviction to feeling, which also must be aroused, an expression, in other words, that pours over into affection, positively requires intensification by means of an accompanying gesture. Thus we see that where hearing is to be aroused to greater sensuous participation, the communicator involuntarily has to turn to the eye also: ear and eye must mutually assure one another of a communication of higher intensity in order to conduct it convincingly to the feeling. But in its communication to the eye--which had become necessary--gesture here uttered precisely what verbal language was no longer able to express; if it could have, then the gesture would have been superfluous and disturbing. The eye was therefore excited by the gesture in a way still lacking the corresponding counterpoise of the communication to hearing: this counterpoise, however, is necessary for the completion of the impression so that it becomes one fully understandable to the feeling. The verse, which in its excitation has become melody, ultimately does dissolve the conceptual content of the original verbal communication into an emotive content: but the component of the communication to the ear that corresponds fully to gesture is still not contained in this melody; there lies in it precisely, as the most excited linguistic expression possible, only the impulse to the intensification of gesture as a reinforcing element which the melody still lacked just because that which corresponds fully to it--to the intensified element of gesture--still could not be contained in it. Thus the melody of the verse contained only the condition for the manifestation of gesture; that which is to justify the gesture before the feeling, however, just as the verse was to be justified--or still better to be clarified--through the melody or the melody through the harmony, lies still beyond the power of that melody which proceeded from the linguistic verse and which remains with an essential, indispensably qualified aspect of its constitution turned precisely towards verbal language, which is not able to articulate the specific feature of gesture and therefore called upon gesture for help and now simply can not impart what corresponds to gesture completely to the hearing that seeks it.-- That which in gesture is consequently unutterable in the language of tonal speech, however, the speech of the orchestra, entirely liberated from this verbal language, is now able to communicate anew to hearing in just the way that gesture itself reveals it to the eye.
The orchestra secured the capacity of doing this from the accompaniment of the most perceptible gesture of all, the gesture of dance, of which this accompaniment was a necessity defined by its very essence for its intelligible manifestation, since the gesture of dance, like gesture in general, is related to orchestral melody almost as verse is to the vocal melody conditioned by it, so that gesture and orchestral melody really constitute just such a whole, understandable in itself, as the melody of tonal speech taken alone.--Their most perceptible point of contact, in which both--the one in space, the other in time; the one for the eye, the other for the ear--revealed themselves as entirely alike and reciprocally conditioned, the gesture of dance and the orchestra possessed in rhythm, and to this point both must necessarily return again after every departure from it in order to remain or become intelligible there, where their most fundamental relatedness is uncovered. From this point of departure, however, gesture and orchestra expand in equal measure to the power of speech most characteristic of both. Just as gesture reveals to the eye in this power what is only utterable by it, so the orchestra communicates fully to the ear that which again corresponds exactly to this revelation in the same way that at the point of departure-- the connection of musical rhythm--it clarified to the hearing what was revealed to the eye in the most sensuously perceptible elements of the motion of dance. The setting down of the foot as it was again lowered after its elevation was exactly the same to the eye as the accented downbeat was to the ear; and thus the animated tonal figure performed by instruments, which unites the downbeats melodically, is then also wholly the same to the hearing as the motion of the foot is to the eye, or of the other expressive members of the body during their change, which corresponds to the downbeat. Now the further gesture distances itself from its most definite but at the same time also its most restricted basis in the dance, and the more sparingly it partitions its sharpest accents in order to become, in the most manifold and finest traditions of expression, an endlessly capable power of speech, then the more multifariously and itnely do the tonal figures of instrumental speech shape themselves also, which speech, in order to impart the unutterable of gesture convincingly, secures a melodic expression of the most characteristic kind, the immeasurably rich capacity of which can be designated by verbal speech neither in content nor in form, precisely because this content and this form already reveal themselves fully to hearing through orchestral melody and can still be perceived anew only by the eye, and indeed as the content and form of the gesture corresponding to that melody.
That formerly this characteristic power of speech of the orchestra was still by far not able to develop to the fullness of which it is capable finds its explanation precisely in the fact that--as I have already mentioned in its appropriate place--with the lack of any true dramatic basis for the opera, the gestural play for it was still taken over quite directly from the pantomime of the dance. This ballet pantomime could reveal itself only in movements and gestures that were thoroughly restricted and finally, for the sake of the greatest possible intelligibility, established as stereotyped postulates, because it totally lacked the conditions that would have determined and explained its larger variety as necessary. These conditions are contained in language, and indeed not in the language which is drawn upon for help but in that which draws upon gesture for help. The heightened power of speech that the orchestra consequently could not secure in pantomime and opera it sought to gain for itself from instrumental music that was absolute and freed from the pantomime, as though in an instinctive knowledge of its capacity. We saw that this striving in its greatest strength and sincerity had to lead to the longing for justification by the word and by the gesture that is conditioned by the word, and we have now still to recognize how from the other side the complete realization of the poetic intention is again only to be made possible in the highest and most clarifying justification of the melody of the linguistic verse through the perfected power of speech of the orchestra in association with gesture.
The poetic intention, as it desires to realize itself in the drama, demands the highest and most manifold expression of gesture, indeed it entails its multiplicity, force, fineness, and mobility to a degree in which it necessarily can manifest itself simply nowhere else than in the drama alone, and is therefore to be devised for this drama in an entirely particular characteristic way; for the dramatic action with all its motives is one intensified and elevated above life to the point of the wonderful. The compression of the components of the action and of its motives was to be made intelligible to the feeling only in an again compressed expression that raised itself from the verse to a melody which directly determined the feeling. Now just as this expression intensifies itself into melody, so it necessarily also requires an intensification of the gesture entailed by it above the level of the ordinary gesture of speech. This gesture, however, in accordance with the character of the drama, is not only the gestural monologue of a single individual, but rather one increased to the greatest diversity through the characteristically interrelated encounter of many individuals-- "polyphonic" gesture, so to speak. The dramatic intention draws into its realm not only the inner feeling in itself but also, for the sake of its realization, quite especially the manifestation of this feeling in the external corporeal appearance of the dramatic characters. Pantomime satisfies itself with typical masks for the figure, bearing, and dress of the actors: the all-powerful drama tears the typical masks from the actors--for it possesses the justifying power of speech to that end--and shows them as particular individualities revealing themselves exactly so and not otherwise. The dramatic intention therefore determines down to the most individual trait the figure, countenance, attitude, motion, and dress of the actor to allow him to appear at every instant as this one, rapidly and definitely recognizable individual, well distinguished from all those encountering him. This drastic distinguishableness of the one individuality, however, can only be made possible if all the individualities encountering him and relating themselves to him are represented in exactly the same, surely defined, dramatic distinguishableness. If we now visualize the manifestation of such sharply defined individualities in the endlessly changeable relationships to one another from which the manifold components and motives of the action develop, and if we imagine them in accordance with the endlessly exciting impression that their sight must produce on our powerfully arrested eye, then we will also comprehend the need of hearing for an impression which is intelligible to it in return, which fully corresponds to the impression on the eye, and in which the first impression appears completed, justified, or clarified; for "The full truth becomes known only through the testimony of two witnesses."(6)
That which hearing demands to perceive, however, is exactly the unutterable of the impression received from the eye--that which in itself and in its motion the poetic intention only gave rise to through its direct instrument, speech in words, but can not now communicate convincingly to the hearing. if this sight were not present for the eye at all, then the poetic language could feel justified in imparting the portrayal and description of what was imagined to the phantasy; but when this itself is offered directly to the eye, as the highest poetic intention demands, the portrayal of the poetic language is not only completely superfluous, but also would remain totally without an impression on the hearing. What is unutterable by it, however, is now communicated to the hearing precisely by the language of the orchestra, and precisely from the demand of the hearing, aroused by the sisterly eye, this language secures a new, immeasurable, but without this arousal a steadily slumbering, or--if awakened solely by its own impulse--an unintelligibly revealed power.
The orchestra's capacity of speech depends also, for the increased task specified here, again on its relationship with the capacity of gesture as we have learned to know it from the dance. It speaks in tonal figures, as these are peculiar to the individual character of particularly appropriate instruments and develop themselves by means of a similarly appropriate mixture of the characteristic individualities of the orchestra into the special orchestral melody. And it speaks that which reveals itself in its sensible appearance and through gesture to the eye to such a degree that for the interpretation of this gesture and appearance for the understanding of the eye, just as for the corresponding understandable interpretation of the same appearance for the immediately comprehending hearing, no third element, namely mediating speech in words, is necessary.
Let us make ourselves quite precise about this.--We say usually, "I read in your eyes"; that is, "From the glance of your eye my eye perceives, in a way understandable to it only, an inward involuntary feeling of yours that I again involuntarily feel with you."--If we now extend the sensitive capacity of the eye over the whole external figure of the human being to be perceived--to his appearance, bearing, and gesture--we have to confirm that the eye faithfully grasps and understands the expression of this human being as soon as he reveals himself in complete involuntariness, is at one with himself inwardly, and expresses his inner mood with the utmost directness. The moments in which the human being so truthfully reveals himself, however, are only those of the most complete peace or of the highest excitement: what lies between these two most extreme points are the transitions, which are only defined by the genuine passion to the extent that they approach their highest agitation, or turn themselves from this agitation again toward a harmoniously conciliated peace. These transitions consist of a mixture of voluntary, reflective activity of the will and unconscious, necessary feeling: the determination of such transitions in the necessary direction of the involuntary feeling, and indeed with an essential progress towards discharge into the true feeling no longer qualified and obstructed by the reflective understanding, is the content of the poetic intention in the drama, and for this content the poet finds just the expression that uniquely makes it possible in the melody of the verse, that appears as the blossom of the verbal-tonal speech, which has one side turned toward reflective understand- ing but the other side turned toward involuntary feeling as its organ. Gesture--and we understand under this the whole outer manifestation of the human appearance to the eye-- plays only a restricted part in this development, because it has only one side, and indeed the emotive side, with which it faces the eye: the side which it hides from the eye, however, is precisely that which the verbal-tonal speech turns toward the understanding, and which would accordingly remain entirely unknown to the feeling if hearing, through the fact that the verbal-tonal speech turns both its sides toward it (although one in a weaker and less exciting way), could not develop the intensified capacity to conduct intelligibly to the feeling also this side turned away from the eye.
The speech of the orchestra is able to effect this through the hearing, since it is intensified by a dependence on the melody of the verse that is just as inward as its previous dependence on gesture up to the point of communication to the feeling of even the thought, and indeed of the thought that the presentness of the verse melody--as the revelation of a mixed, still not completely appropriated feeling--can not and will not utter, and which can be communicated still less, however, to the eye by gesture, because gesture is the most present thing of all and therefore is determined by the indistinct feeling revealed in the melody of the verse as an equally indistinct one, or as one expressing only this indistinctness, and thus as one not clearly making the true feeling intelligible to the eye.
In the melody of the verse not only is speech in words united with speech in tones, but also those things expressed by these two organs are united, namely the absent with the present, the thought with the feeling. What is present in it is the involuntary feeling as it pours out through necessity into the expression of the melody of the music; what is absent is the abstract thought as it is fixed in the verbal phrase as a reflective, voluntary motive.-- Let us now define more closely what we have to understand by the thought.
Here also we shall arrive quickly at a clear idea if we grasp our object from an artistic standpoint and examine the basis of its origin in sense.
Something that we can not express at all even when we want to is a nonentity--a nothingness. Everything for which on the contrary we find an expression is also something actual, and we will recognize this actual if we account for the expression itself that we use involuntarily for the thing. The expression thought is a very easily explainable one as soon as we go back to its sensuous linguistic root. A "thought" ["Gedanke"] is an image of something actual but not present "appearing" ["dünkende"] to us in "memory" ["Gedenken"].(7) This not-present thing is in respect of its origin an actual, sensuously perceived object which in another place or at another time has made a definite impression on us; this impression seized upon our feeling, for which--in order to communicate it--we had to find an expression that corresponded to the impression of the object in accordance with the general capacity of feeling of the human species. Thus we could make the object part of ourselves only in respect of the impression it made on our feeling, and this impression, determined again by our capacity of feeling, is the image that appears [dünkt] to us in thinking of [Gedenken] the object itself. Thinking of and remembering are thus the same, and in truth the thought is the image which returns in the memory and which--as the impression of an object on our feeling--is formed by this feeling itself and is again led by the mindful memory, by this witness to the lasting power of feeling and to the force of the impression made on it, before the feeling itself for the vivid arousal, the re-experiencing, of the impression. The development of thought to the capacity for the binding combination of all personally obtained or handed down images of impressions stored up in the memory of objects no longer present--thinking as it confronts us in the discipline of philosophy--does not here have to concern us; for the path of the poet runs from philosophy to the work of art, the actualization of the thought in sensuousness. Only one thing do we still have to determine exactly. Something that has not first made an impression on our feeling we can also not think, and the preceding manifestation in feeling is the condition for the formulation of the thought to be announced. Also the thought is therefore provoked by the feeling and must necessarily flow forth again into feeling, for it is the bond between a feeling not present and one struggling in the present to proclaim itself.
The verse-melody of the poet, to a certain extent before our eyes, now actualizes the thought, i.e. the feeling not present that is represented through remembering, as a present, actually perceptible feeling. In the purely verbal verse it contains the feeling that is portrayed from the memory, thought of, described and not present, but conditioning; in the purely musical melody, by contrast, it contains the conditioned, the new, present feeling into which the thought of, inciting, absent feeling is dissolved, as into one related to it and newly actualized. The feeling revealed in this melody--a feeling which is well developed and justified before our eyes from the recollection of an earlier feeling, and which is directly arresting sensuously and firmly defines the sympathizing emotional faculty--is now a manifestation that belongs to us to whom it was communicated just as much as to the one who communicated it; and just as it returns to the communicator as a thought--that is, a memory--so in exactly the same way can we preserve it as a thought.--The one communicating it, when in thinking of this manifestation of feeling he feels himself impelled again from this recollection to the announcement of a new and once more present feeling, takes up this recollection now only as a portrayed and not present factor that is briefly indicated to the recollective understanding, takes it up in just the way that in the same verse melody in which it expressed itself in that melodic manifestation--now familiar to the memory--he revealed to us the recollection of an earlier feeling, removed from us in its actual life, as a thought creative of feeling, We, however--we who receive the new communi- cation--are able to take hold of that feeling, now still only recollected, in its purely melodic manifestation itself, through the hearing: it has become the property of pure music, and brought to sensible perception by the orchestra with appropriate expression, it appears to us as the actualization, the presence, of what has just now only been thought. Such a melody, just as it has been imparted to us by the actor as the outpouring of a feeling, makes actual to us the thought of this actor when it is performed expressively by the orchestra at the time when the actor still harbors that feeling only in his memory: indeed even when the present informant appears no longer even aware of that feeling, the characteristic sounding of the melody in the orchestra can arouse in us a feeling that becomes a thought--for the completion of a context, for the highest intelligibility of a situation through the interpretation of motives that are indeed contained in this situation but cannot come into clear appearance in their representable components--but which in itself is more than the thought, namely the emotive content of the thought made present.
When the power of the musician is used by the poetic intention for its highest realization, it becomes in this way measureless through the orchestra.--Without being affected by the poetic intention, the absolute musician already fancied even formerly that he had to do with thoughts and the combination of thoughts. When simply musical themes were called "thoughts," this was either a thoughtless application of the word or a revelation of the deception of the musician who called a theme a thought during which he indeed had thought something but which no one understood except at the most some one to whom he characterized what he had thought simply in words and whom he requested in this way now also to think this thing thought along with the theme. Music can not think; it can, however, actualize thoughts, that is, reveal its emotive content as a no longer remembered one but as one made present: it can do this, however, only when its own message is qualified by the poetic intention, and this again reveals itself not as something only thought, but first of all as clearly expounded through the organ of understanding, spoken language. A musical motif can produce on the feeling a definite impression that shapes itself into reasonable activity only when the feeling expressed in the motif was announced before our eyes also as definite-- that is, as well determined--by a definite individual concerning a definite object. With the elimination of these conditions a musical motif is presented to the feeling as something indefinite, and no matter how often something indefinite returns with the same appearance it will always remain for us only just a returning indefinite something that we are not able to justify by a necessity we feel for its appearance and therefore not able to connect with anything else.--But the musical motif into which--before our eyes, so to speak--the reasoned verse of a dramatic character was poured forth is a necessarily conditioned one; with its return a definite feeling is perceptibly communicated to us, and indeed again as the feeling of the one who just at this moment feels impelled to convey a new feeling which derives from that now unspoken by him but made sensuously perceptible to us by the orchestra. The sounding of that motif thus connects for us a determining feeling not present with the one determined by it and now making its appearance; and since we make our feeling in this way an enlightened perceiver of the organic growth of one definite feeling from another, we endow our feeling with the power of thinking, which here, however, is the involuntary knowledge, elevated above thinking, of the thought that is actualized in feeling.
Before we turn to the presentation of the results that are yielded by the previously outlined power of orchestral speech for the formulation of the drama, we must still, in order to measure the compass of this power completely, define exactly for ourselves an extreme capacity it contains.--The capacity of its power of speech that is intended here the orchestra secures by uniting the capacities that accrued to it on the one hand through its dependence on gesture and on the other through its mindful adoption of the melody of the verse. Just as gesture developed from its source, the purely physical gesture of dance, to the most refined mimic art, and just as the melody of the verse progressed from the mere recollection of a feeling to the most immediate revelation of a feeling--so the orchestral power of speech, which secured its formative strength from both factors and nourished and intensified itself from the growth of both to their most extreme capacity, also grows from this double source of nourishment to a special, high capacity in which we see the two divided arms of the orchestral stream, after it has been richly fertilized by entering brooks and rivers, again unite, as it were, and flow on together. There where gesture rests completely, that is, and the melodic speech of the actor is totally silent--there, then, where the drama readies itself from still unuttered inner moods, these moods until now still unuttered can be uttered by the orchestra in such a way that their manifestation has the intrinsic character--which is given the quality of necessity by the poetic intention--of foreboding.--
Foreboding is the conveying of a feeling that is still unuttered because--in the sense of our verbal language--it is still unutterable. A feeling is unutterable which is not yet defined, and it is undefined if it is not yet defined by the object that corresponds to it. The stirring of this feeling, the foreboding, is thus the involuntary demand of the feeling for definition by an object which it in turn defines in advance for itself from the strength of its need, and indeed as such a one as must correspond to it and for which it therefore is waiting. In its manifestation as foreboding I might compare the capacity of feeling to a well tuned harp whose strings sound because of the gust of wind blowing through them and await the player who is to draw distinct chords from them.
Such a foreboding mood the poet has to awaken in us in order through its demand to make ourselves joint creators of the work of art. By calling forth this demand in us, he obtains in our aroused receptivity the conditioning force which uniquely can make possible to him the formation of the manifestations he aims at in exactly the way he must form them in keeping with his intention. In the production of such moods as the poet must awaken in us for the indispensable cooperation on our part, the absolute language of instruments has already shown itself to be all-powerful; for precisely the arousal of undefined feelings of foreboding was its most characteristic effect, which had to become a weakness everywhere that it also sought to define the aroused feelings clearly. If we now apply this extraordinary and uniquely facilitating capacity of instrumental speech to the components of the drama where it is in actuality to be placed by the poet according to a definite intention, we would have to explain to ourselves where this language has to find the sensuous factors of expression in which it is to manifest itself in accordance with the poetic intention.
We have already seen that our absolute instrumental music had to derive the sensuous factors of its expression from a dance rhythm inherently familiar to our ear and the tune descended from it, or from the melos of the folksong as it equally is inculcated into our hearing. The absolute instrumental composer sought to raise the always thoroughly undefined element of these factors to a defined expression in that he fitted the factors together according to their relationship and difference into an image presented to the phantasy that was based both on growing and subsiding intensity and on accelerated and retarded speed of performance, and finally on the special characteristic quality of expression due to the manifold tonal individuality of the instruments, and yet ultimately only in that he again felt impelled to make himself really clear by an exact--extramusical--specification of the object described. So-called "tone painting" was the visible conclusion of the development of our absolute instrumental music: in it this art perceptibly chilled its expression, which no longer addresses the feeling but rather the phantasy, and anyone will clearly perceive this impression who hears after a piece of Beethoven one of Mendelssohn or indeed an orchestral composition of Berlioz. Nevertheless it is not to be denied that this course of development was a necessary one and that the definite turn to tone painting arose from more candid motives, such as for example the return to the fugal style of Bach. Nominally, however; there also can be no mistake that the sensuous capacity of instrumental language was uncommonly heightened and enriched by tone painting.--Let us now recognize that not only can this capacity be heightened beyond measure, but also that the chilling feature can be taken completely from its expression at the same time, if the tone painter is permitted to address himself again, instead of to the phantasy, to the feeling, which is made possible to him in that the object of his description, imparted by him only to thought, is revealed to the senses as a present and actual one, and indeed not just as a mere means of help in the understanding of his tone picture, but rather as determined by the highest poetic intention in the realization of which the tone picture is to be the helping factor. The object of the tone picture could only be a motive from nature or from human life itself. Now it is exactly such motives of natural or human life, however, to the description of which the musician formerly felt himself drawn, which the poet requires for the preparation of important dramatic developments and the powerful help of which the former absolute poet had to renounce in advance to the greatest disadvantage of his desired work of art, because he had to consider those motives, the more completely they were to be expressed by the scene through the eye, as unjustified, disturbing, and lifeless but not as helping and furthering without the supplemental musical participation that defined the feeling.
Those undefined feelings of foreboding necessarily to be aroused in us by the poet will always have to stand in a connection with a manifestation that again imparts itself to the eye; this will be an instance of the natural environment or of the human center of this environment--in any event, an instance whose movement is not yet conditioned by a definitely announced feeling, for this can only be articulated by verbal language in its already more closely characterized union with gesture and music--by verbal language, then, whose defining message we conceive here precisely as one first to be called forth by an aroused desire. No language is capable of expressing a preparatory calm so full of motion besides the language of instruments: to intensify this calm into dynamic desire is its most characteristic power. What presents itself to our eye from a natural scene or from a silent gestureless human appearance, and directs our feeling through the eye to calm contemplation, music is able to conduct to the feeling in such a way that, departing from the element of calmness, this feeling moves towards tension and expectation, and thus awakens precisely the desire that the poet requires on our part as an aid making possible the revelation of his intention. This arousal of our feeling in the direction of a definite object the poet in fact requires even to prepare us for a defining appearance to the eye; that is: even so as not to present to us the appearance of the natural scene or of the human individualities until our aroused expectation of them qualifies them, in the way they are revealed, as necessary because they correspond to the expectation.--
The expression of music will remain, in the application of this most extreme capacity, a totally vague and undefining one as long as it does not take up into itself the poetic intention just characterized: but this, which is related to a definite appearance that is to be actualized, is able in advance to borrow from this appearance the sensuous elements of the preparatory musical piece in such a way that they correspond to it, in a manner replete with reference, fully in the way the appearance finally introduced corresponds to the expectation that the musical piece aroused in us by its predictive announcement. The actual appearance comes before us accordingly as a fulfilled demand, as a justified presentiment; and if we recall that the poet must make the appearances of the drama present to the feeling as wonderful and standing out above ordinary life, then we also have to comprehend that these appearances would not convey themselves to us as such or that they would have to appear unintelligible and strange to us if their finally naked revelation could not be qualified as necessary by our prepared feeling, tense with an expectation full of foreboding, in such a manner that we plainly demand them as the fulfillment of an expectation. But it is possible only to the tonal speech of the orchestra, as fulfilled in this way by the poet, to provoke this necessary expectation in us, and without its artistic aid the drama of wonder can neither be planned nor produced.
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NOTES
(1)
bewiesen as opposed to nachgewiesen (established). I have not been
able to duplicate this verbal contrast in my translation.
(2)
I am reminded of the little castrato knife.
(3)
The abstract musician also did not perceive the complete incapacity for
mixture of the tone colors, for example, of the piano and the violin. A
major component of the pleasures of his artistic life consisted in playing
sonatas for piano and violin and soon without becoming aware that he was
bringing to light a music that was only imagined but not presented to
actual hearing. Thus hearing was passed by in favor of seeing for what he
heard were precisely only harmonic abstractions, to which alone his sense
of hearing was still receptive, while the living flesh of the musical
expression had to remain totally imperceptible to him.
(4)
A compared object can never be completely equivalent to another, but rather
the similarity will sustain itself only in one direction, not in all
directions; the objects of organic structure are never completely alike but
only those of mechanical structure.
(5)
This simple explanation of the "unutterable" could be extended doubtless not
unjustly to all those things in religious philosophy that from the standpoint
of the speaking person are given out to be absolutely unutterable and in
themselves are very well utterable if only the corresponding organ for this is
utilized.
(6)
"Durch zweier Zeugen Mund wird (erst) die (volle) Wahrheit kund."
(7)
Similarly we can interpret "spirit" ["Geist"] very nicely from the equivalent
root "to pour" ["giessen"]: in a literal sense it is that which "streams out"
[das sich "Ausgiessende"] of us, just as the aroma is that which spreads or
streams out from the flower.