In Lohengrin we take leave of the early music that obscured Wagner's ideals, and in the Ring we come to the music which transcends all other aspects of Wagnerism. Had Wagner been a man of more urbane literary intellect he might have been less ambitious of expressing a world-philosophy in music-drama; and it is just conceivable that the result might have been a less intermittent dramatic movement in his later works, and a balance of ethical ideas at once more subtle and more orthodox.
If we wish to know what Wagner means, we must fight our way through his drama to his music ; and we must not expect to find that each phrase in the mouth of the actor corresponds word for note with the music. That sort of correspondence Wagner leaves to his imitators; and his views on "Leit-motif hunting," as expressed in his prose writings and conversation, are contemptuously tolerant. We shall indeed find that his orchestra interprets the dramatic situations which his poetry roughly outlines. But we shall also find that, even if we could conceive the poetry to be a perfect expression of all that can be given in words and actions, the orchestra will express something greater ; it will not run parallel with the poetry ; the Leitmotif system will not be a collection of labels ; the musical expression of singer and orchestra will not be a mere heightened resource of dramatic declamation. All that kind of pre-established harmony Wagner left behind him the moment he deserted the heroes and villains of romantic opera for the visionary and true tragedy of gods and demi-gods, giants and gnomes, with beauty, nobility and love in the wrong, and the forces of destruction and hate set free by blind justice.
In Wagner's harmonic style we encounter the entire problem of modern musical texture. Wagner effected vast changes in almost every branch of his all-embracing art, from theatre building and stage-lighting to the musical declamation of words. Most of his reforms have since been intelligently carried out as normal principles in more arts than one; but, shocking as the statement may seem to 20th-century orthodoxy, Wagnerian harmony is a universe as yet unexplored, except by the few composers who are so independent of its bewildering effect on the generation that grew up with it, that they can use Wagner's resources as discreetly as he used them himself. The last two examples at the end of the article on HARMONY show almost all that is new in Wagner's harmonic principles. The peculiar art therein is that while the discords owe their intelligibility and softness to the smooth melodic lines by which in "resolving" they prove themselves but transient rainbow-hues on or below the surface, they owe their strangeness to the intense vividness with which at the moment of impact they suggest a mysteriously remote foreign key. Wagner's orthodox contemporaries regarded such mixtures of key as sheer nonsense; and it would seem that the rank and file of his imitators agree with that view, since they either plagiarize Wagner's actual progressions or else produce such mixtures with no vividness of key-colour and little attempt to follow those melodic trains of thought by which Wagner makes sense of them. There is far more of truly Wagnerian
harmony to be found before his time than since. It was so early recognized as characteristic of Chopin that a magnificent example may be seen at the end of Schumann's little tone-portrait of him in the Carnaval: a very advanced Wagnerian passage on another principle constitutes the bulk of the development in the first movement of Beethoven's sonata Les Adieux; while even in the "Golden Age" of music, and within the limits of pure diatonic concord, the unexpectedness of many of Palestrina's chords is hardly less Wagnerian than the perfect smoothness of the melodic lines which combine to produce them.
Wagnerian harmony is, then, neither a side-issue nor a progress per saltum, but a leading current in the stream of musical evolu tion. That stream is sure sooner or later to carry with it every reality that has been reached by side-issues and leaps ; and of such things we have important cases in the works of Strauss and Debussy. Strauss makes a steadily increasing use of avowedly irrational discords, in order to produce an emotionally apt physical sensation. Debussy has this in common with Strauss, that he too regards harmonies as pure physical sensations ; but he differs from Strauss firstly in systematically refusing to regard them as anything else, and secondly in his extreme sensibility to harshness. We have seen (in the articles on HARMONY and Music) how harmonic music originated in just this habit of regarding combinations of sound as mere sensations, and how for centuries the habit opposed itself to the intellectual principles. of contrapuntal harmony. These intellectual principles are, of course, not without their own ground in physical sensation; but it is evident that Debussy appeals beyond them to a more primitive instinct ; and on it he bases an almost perfectly co herent system of which the laws are, like those of i2th-century music, precisely the opposite of those of classical harmony. The only illogical point in his system is that the beauty of his dreamlike chords depends not only on his artful choice of a timbre that minimizes their harshness, but also on the fact that they enter the ear with the meaning they have acquired through centuries of harmonic evolution on classical lines. There is a special pleasure in the subsidence of that meaning beneath a soothing sensation; but a system based thereon cannot be universal. Its phenomena are, however, perfectly real, and can be observed wherever artistic conditions make the tone of a mass of harmony more important than the interior threads of its texture. This is of constant occurrence in classical pianoforte music, in which thick chords are subjected to polyphonic laws only in their top and bottom notes, while the inner notes make a solid mass of sound in which numerous consecutive fifths and octaves are not only harmless but essential to the balance of tone. In Debussy's art the top and bottom are also involved in the antipolyphonic laws of such masses of sound, thus making these laws paramount.