Programme Music

Beethoven is recorded to have said that he always composed according to a "picture" he had in his mind; and he sometimes gave his friends an explanation, jocular or evasive, of some par ticular composition. But the word Bild is much more indefinite than "picture"; and Beethoven's dull Boswell, Schindler, often ex asperated him into defending himself by saying the first non sense that would serve to stop foolish questions. Composers who have much to express cannot spare time for translating it into other terms than those of their own art. The Eroica Symphony, though inspired by Beethoven's short-lived belief in Napoleon as the liberator of mankind, is not programme music at all. The funeral march represents heroic death and a mourning world, but not the obsequies of a biographical subject ; and when critics tell us that the finale is "an inappropriate concession to sonata form" they merely show themselves unmusical without thereby becom ing literary. The profound and subtle sonata Les Adieux, l'Ab sence et le Retour is true programme music. It represents Bee thoven's feelings on parting from the Archduke Rudolph when the royal family left Vienna shortly before its bombardment. It deals only with the parting, the absence and rejoining of the two men. Nothing is heard of war, and the sentiment is as deep as it is manly. Beethoven's private sketch-books record that the work is "written from the heart": no courtly formula, even if this was shown to the Archduke. Ingenuity is misplaced in tracing external details. (The end of the first movement of Les Adieux has been compared to the departure of a coach.) The real emo tional basis is universal and musical.

Beethoven summed up the whole theory of great programme music in his note to the Pastoral Symphony; "rather the ex pression of feelings than sound-painting." Overtures to plays or operas cannot so easily dispense with story-telling; but Beethoven refuses to be drawn into a chronological series of illustrations. His overtures to Coriolan, Egmont and Leonora deal with salient emotions roused by their subjects. Wagner was able to place the substance of the Coriolan overture in Shakespeare's scene between Coriolanus and his mother and wife before the gates of Rome ; but Thayer found that the forgotten poet Collin's play, which was Beethoven's subject, sheds far more light on the music. The music, however, once it took shape, could do without Collin or Shakespeare. The Leonora overture was at first (in the form known as No. 2) a huge prelude to the opera, with a gigantic exposition and development, and the shortest wind-up compatible with adequacy, after the trumpet-call behind the scene has relieved the tension. In the later version (Leonora No. 3.) Beethoven ruthlessly compresses the exposition until the trumpet-call be comes the middle point of the design, which afterwards expands in a further development, full recapitulation and a climax which makes this overture the first and greatest of all "symphonic poems" (q.v.). Critics who cavil at the trumpet-call as a weak

ness from the point of view of absolute music only show that they cannot tell absolute music from absolute nonsense. Distance is surely too elementary a phase of sound to be excluded from ab solute music, nor can the fanfares of a trumpet be separated either from the instrument or from its associations. As a piece of absolute music Leonora No. 3. is a huge movement in sonata form rising steadily to a point at which the tension is relieved by the new irkident of a distant trumpet-call, after which the music expands from sheer joy. Beethoven's maxim inehr Aus druck der Empfindung als Malerei therefore holds here, and bridges the gulf between absolute and illustrative music.

Portrayal of Characters and Moods.

This is equally true with archaic and modern programme music ; it is always charac ters and moods that are successfully portrayed, while chronology is useless and the illustration of incidents is apt to be ridiculous unless it contrives to be witty. Thus, the Bible Sonatas of J. Kuhnau (published in 1700) and their clever imitation in Bach's early Capriccio on the Departure of a Beloved Brother rely mainly on moods, and are successful with incidents only when these would be accompanied by music in real life or drama. If Kuhnau's music were half as vivid or inventive as his prose in troductions it would be immortal. But much may be learnt from noting how his unconsciously humorous prose describes other things than the music attempts to portray and omits the very things in which the music is at its best. While Kuhnau strains himself, like a bad nurse telling bogey-stories, in his prefatory description of the size and appearance of Goliath, in the music it is the boasts (le bravate) of Goliath that are portrayed. The best movement in the Goliath sonata is a figured chorale (Aus tiefer Noth schrei' ich zu Dir) representing the terror and prayers of the Israelites. On the other hand the cast of David's sling, with the fall of Goliath, is not nearly so sublime as the fall of a tea-tray. Kuhnau's other subjects (Saul cured by David's music; The Marriage of Jacob; The Healing of Hezekiah; Gideon, and The Funeral of Jacob) are all thoroughly musical; more so than he succeeds in making them. Bach's Capriccio describes the anxiety and sorrow of the friends of the departing brother ; and his utmost realism takes the form of a lively fugue on the themes of the postilion's coachhorn and cracking whip. Buxtehud illus trated the "nature and characters of the planets." This is an astro logical, not an astronomical subject : the planets signify tempera ments and their motions are the music of the spheres. No wonder, then, that this musical subject has been adopted in one of the outstanding masterpieces of modern orchestral music, The Planets, by Holst.