constant level of comic interest. (In the Leipzig edition of the
parts of this work the modern editor has added a new and
worthy act to Mozart's glorious farce by correcting and questioning
many of the mistakes) Mozart's burlesque has remained
u nap pro ached, even in dramatic music. Compared with it,
Wagner's portrait of Beckmesser in Die M eistersinger seems
embittered in conception and disappointing in comic effect.
Mendelssohn is said to have had a splendid faculty for extemporizing
similar musical ' jokes. His Funeral March of
Pyramus and Thisbe in the Midsummer Night's Dream, and
Cornelius's operatic trio in which three persons conjugate the
verb Ich sterbe den Tod des Verraters, are among the few examples
of a burlesque in which there is enough musical sense
to keep the joke alive. Such burlesques have their bearing
on programme music, in so far as they involve the musical portrayal
of character and give 'opportunity for masterly studies
of the psychology of failure. Their special resources thus play
a large part in the recent development of the symphonic poem
by Richard Strauss, whose instrumental works avowedly
illustrate his cheerfully pessimistic views on art and life.
But into the main classics of programme music this kind of
characterization hardly enters at all.
Beethoven was three times moved to ascribe some of his profoundest music to an external source. In the first instance, that of the Eroica Symphony, he did not really produce anything that can fairly be called programme music. Napoleon, before he became emperor, was his ideal hero; and a triumphant symphony, on a gigantic scale and covering the widest range of emotion expressible by music, seemed to him a tribute due to the liberator of Europe; until the liberator became the tyrant. That the slow movement should be a funeral march was, in relation to the heroic tone of the work, as natural as that a symphony should have a slow movement at all, There' is no reason in music why the idea of heroic death and mourning should be the end of the representation of heroic ideals. Hence it is unnecessary, though plausible, to hear, in the lively whispering opening of the scherzo, the babel of the fickle crowd that soon forgets its hero; and the criticism which regards the finale as “ an inappropriate concession to sonata form ” may be' dismissed as merely unmusical without therefore being literary. Beethoven's next work inspired from without was the Pastoral S ymphony: and there he records his theory of programme music on the title-page, .by calling it “ rather the expression of feeling than tone-painting.” There is not a bar of the Pastoral Symphony that would be otherwise if its “programme ” had never been thought of either by Beethoven or by earlier composers. The nightingale, cuckoo and quail have exactly the same function in the coda of the slow movement as dozens of similar non-thematic episodes at the' close of other slow movements (e.g. in the violin sonata Op. 24, and the pianoforte sonata in D minor). The “ merry meeting of country folk ” is a subject that lends itself admirably to Beethoven's form of scherzo (q.'v.); and the thunderstorm, which interrupts the last repetition of this scherzo, and forms an introduction to the finale, is none the less purely musical for being, like several of Beethoven's inventions, without any formal parallel in other works. Beethoven's Battle Symphony is a clever pot-boiler, which, like most musical representations of such noisy things as battles, may be disregarded in the study of serious programme music. His third great example is the sonata Les Adieux, l'absence et le retour. Here, again, we have a monument of pure sonata form; and, whatever light may be thrown upon the musical interpretation of the work by a knowledge of the relation between Beethoven and his friend and patron the Archduke Rudolph and the circumstances of the archduke's departure from Vienna during the Napoleonic wars, far more light may be thrown upon Beethoven's feelings by the study of the music in itself. This ought obviously to be true 'of all successful programme music; the music ought to illustrate the programme, but we ought not to need to learn or guess at quantities of extraneous information in order to understand the music. No doubt much ingenuity may be spent in tracing external details (the end of the first movement of Les Adieux has been compared to the departure of a coach), but the real emotional basis is of a universal and musical kind. The same observations apply to the overtures to Cariolan, Egmont and Leonora; works in which the origin as music for the stage is so far from distracting Beethoven's attention from musical form that the overture which was at first most inseparably associated with the stage and most irregular in form (Leonora No. 2) took final shape as the most gigantic formal design ever embodied in a single movement (Leonora No. 3), and so proved to be too large for the final version of the opera for which it was first conceived. Beethoven's numerous recorded assertions, whether as to the “ picture ” he had in his mind whenever he composed, or as to the “ meaning ” of any particular composition, are not things on which it is safe to rely. Many of his friends, especially his first biographer, Schindler, irritated him into putting them off with any nonsense that came into his head. Composers who have much to express cannot spare time for expressing it in other terms than those of their own art. r-Modern
programme music shows many divergent tendencies, the least significant of which is the common habit of giving fantastic titles to pieces of instrumental music after they have been composed, as was the case with many of Schumann's pianoforte lyrics. Such a habit may conduce to the immediate popularity of the works, though it is apt to impose on their interpretation limits which might not quite' satisfy the composer himself. But there is plenty of genuine programme music in Schumann's case, though, as with Beethoven, the musical sense throws far more light on the programme than the programme throws upon the music. Musical people may profitably study E. T. A. Hoffmann and Jean Paul Richter in the light of Schumann's N ovellettes and Kreisleriana; but if they do not already understand Schumann's music, jean Paul and Hoffmann willhelp them only to talk about it. The popular love of fantastic titles for music affected even the most abstract and academic composers during the romantic period. No one wrote more programme music than Spohr; and, strange to say, while Spohr's programme constantly interfered with the externals of his form and ruined the latter part of his symphony Die Weihe der Tone, it did not in any way help to broaden his style. Mendelssohn's Scotch and Italian symphonies, and his Hebrides Overture, are cases rather of what may be called local colour than of programme music. His Reformation Symphony, which he himself regarded as a failure, and which was not published until after his death, is a composite production, artistically more successful, though less popular, than Spohr's Weihe der Tone. The overture to the Midsummer N ight's Dream is a marvellous musical epitome of Shakespeare's play; and the one point which invites criticism, namely, the comparative slightness and conventionality of its second subject, may be defended as closely corresponding with Shakespeare's equally defensible treatment of the two pairs of lovers.
The one composer of the mid-nineteenth century who really lived on programme music was Berlioz, but he shows a characteristic inability to make up his mind as to what he is doing at any given moment. Externals appeal to him with such overwhelming force that, with all the genuine power of his rhetoric, he often loses grasp of the situation he thinks he is portraying. The moonshine and the sentiment of the Scene d'amour, in his Romeo and Juliet symphony, is charming; and the agitated sighing episodes which occasionally interrupt its flow, though not musically convincing, are dramatically plain enough to anyone who has once read the balcony scene: but when Berlioz thinks of the nurse knocking or callings at the door his mind is so possessed with the mere incident of the moment that he makes a realistic noise without interrupting the amorous duet. No idea of the emotional tension of the two lovers, of ]uliet's artifices for gaining time, and of her agitation at the interruptions of the nurse, seems here to enter into Berlioz's head. Again, if the whole thing is to be expressed in instrumental music, why do we have, before the scene begins, real voices of persons in various
