9. THE WAGNERIAN DEVELOPMENT AND THE CENCE OF CLASSICAL FORM Wagner formulated his principles of music-drama long before he matured his musical style. It is impossible to understand the musical history of the second half of the 19th century until we frankly admit that the composers of instrumental music saw in Wagner not only the subversive operatic theorist and erotic dramatist but the composer who was popular because of the salvation-army religiosity of the end of the Tannhiiuser overture and the downright vulgarity of the entr'acte before Act III in Lohengrin. His theories and methods might be controversial, but these lapses never were.
Strange to say, Wagner received something like recognition from the doyen of classical champions, Spohr, whose attitude to Beethoven had been merely condescending, but who saw in Der Fliegende Hollander and Tannhiiuser interesting, if faulty, works which well deserved painstaking production at his theatre at Cassel. Schumann too, after joining in the general hostility towards Tannhiiuser, frankly recanted and praised its many noble features. Personally he and Wagner did not get on so well; he found Wagner too talkative and Wagner found that Schumann had nothing to say. Later on when Wagner was in exile, Lohengrin found a powerful champion in Liszt at Weimar.
Liszt presented another problem to sober musicians. Wagner himself at first saw nothing in Liszt but the virtuoso who, when asked for music, would give you a fantasia on Robert le Diable. On the other hand, persons who became bitterly hostile to all the musical tendencies that Liszt fostered went out of their way to declare that no such wonderful interpretations and technique as Liszt's pianoforte playing had ever before been heard on any instrument or orchestra. All Liszt's gestures were superb, from his monumental immobility at the pianoforte to his princely and often really self-sacrificing generosity to other musicians. And at the age of 37 he made the most superb of all his gestures in giving up playing in public. And so the one incontrovertible power of his art became a legend and his actual activity became the championship of unorthodox artists. He took to composing on a more ambitious scale than that of the marvellous pianoforte virtuoso; and became himself the leader of a new development of romantic music. Although he took little pleasure in counterpoint he had none of Berlioz's clumsiness in harmonic texture; and his orchestration, in which his first efforts had the secret assistance of Raff, was always brilliant and novel, though it never caught the Berliozian fire or plumbed the Wagnerian deeps. Liszt real
ised no more than Berlioz the true musical purport of the new ideas which his symphonic poems and Berlioz's symphonic dramatic phantasmagorias were putting forward under all kinds of literary and pictorial names. While the new romantic com posers purported to be devoting instrumental music to the illus tration of literature (see PROGRAMME MUSIC) they were really struggling with a new musical time-scale.
As we have already seen in the present article and in the dis cussion of HARMONY, musical history may be traced in terms of the time-limit over which the listener's memory is brought into play. In the i6th century that limit is from accent to accent; by the end of the 17th century it ran from phrase to phrase. The great architectural forms of Bach could stretch it easily to six minutes, and, in extreme cases to ten. The rise of the dramatic sonata style did not greatly enlarge the time-scale; for there are few well-constructed sonata-movements that exceed a quarter of an hour, though on no smaller scale could Beethoven have pre pared the famous harmonic collision that gave such offence in the first movement of the Eroica symphony. Now this ten-minute time-scale obviously compelled musicians to handle the action of an opera by means of conventions. (See OPERA.) It is less obvious that it also produced a similarly conventional artifice in the relation of sonata-forms to their emotional content. A design may complete itself in ten minutes while raising emotional issues that cannot be dealt with in less than forty. And so the sonata forms are grouped in from two to four (rarely more) movements as artificially as the musical sections of classical operas. Wagner's enormous achievement in music-drama consisted essentially in giv ing music the same time-scale as that of the drama. As with all first solutions of an art-problem he achieved an extreme case, for his drama became cosmically slow. But from Das Rheingold onwards every Wagnerian opening instantly, and without any introductory gestures, lays down the lines of its vast time-scale. to the utter bewilderment of his contemporaries who continued to expect Das Rheingold to show its pattern on Beethoven's time scale, just as Beethoven's contemporaries had heard severe pianissimo bars on the chord of E flat, not as that vaulted vacancy appears in the middle of the andante of the C minor symphony, but as it would have sounded if it were intruded into an andante by Mozart.