Programme Music

Adaptability of Lyrical

Music.—Instrumental music on the lyric scale lends itself to illustrative purposes more readily than larger forms. Nearly all the harpsichord pieces of Couperin have fantastic titles, and a few of them are descriptive music. His greater contemporary and survivor, Rameau, wrote important operas and much extremely graphic harpsichord music. La Poule, with its theme inscribed "co-co-co-co-co-co-cocodai," is an excel lent movement in spacious form, and is also one of the most minutely realistic compositions ever written. French composers have always contributed con amore to music that takes advantage of external stimulus; and already in 18o i descriptive music was considered so specially French that Haydn apologized for his imi tation of frogs in The Seasons, saying that this "franzosische Quark" (rubbish), had been forced on him by a friend. But throughout the growth of the sonata style, not excepting Haydn's own early work, the tendency towards gratuitously descriptive music often appears ; partly because there was no definite dis tinction between early symphonic music and overtures or inci dental music to plays (e.g., Haydn's Il Distratto). Dittersdorf's symphonies on the metamorphoses of Ovid are excellent music in which the descriptive elements do not disturb the symphonic form until the metamorphosis which is then illustrated in almost Wagnerian breadth. For instance, the first three movements of the Change of the Lycian peasants into Frogs show the rusticity of the peasants, the gracefulness of the goddess, and the rude ness of the peasants to the goddess; and then the finale indicates an altercation ended, after a pause, in a low mysterious quivering sound as of frogs in a marsh.

Dittersdorf is not a great composer; but many more learned and resourceful artists have shown less than his common-sense in distributing the descriptive and the formal elements of their music. It seems incredible that any composer could be so foolish as to commit himself to describing a chronological sequence in a sonata-form which compels him to go through a full restatement of events which only happened once; yet many composers refused to abandon either the sonata form or the chronological sequence. Lyric forms presented no such difficulties.

Schumann and Spohr.

Schumann sometimes invented his titles after his pianoforte lyrics were finished, and sometimes wrote on the inspiration of literature. In either case, as with Beethoven, the music throws far more light on the programme than the programme throws on the music. Musical people may profitably study E. T. A. Hoffman and Jean Paul Richter in the light of Schumann's Novelletten and Kreisleriana; but if they do not already understand Schumann's music, Jean Paul and Hoff man will help them only to talk about it. In revising his early works Schumann sometimes made them more musical and some times destroyed grotesque touches that are musically as well as psychologically true. For instance, in the Davidsbundler-tanze

(op. 6.) the hot-headed Florestan, having finished an impassioned tirade, feels that he has been making a fool of himself. His last note pauses unharmonized and he sits down awkwardly. In a later edition, with unnecessary scruple Schumann suppressed this detail together with the prose titles and signatures. The fashion of fantastic titles affected even the most formal composers during the romantic period.

No one wrote more programme music than Spohr ; and, while Spohr's programme constantly conflicted with the externals of his form and ruined the latter part of his symphony Die Weihe der Tone, it did not broaden his style. Mendelssohn's Scotch and Italian symphonies, and his Hebrides overture, are cases of gen eralized local colour. His Reformation symphony, which he him self regarded as a failure, and which was not published until after his death, is a descriptive work less attractive but more coherent than Spohr's Weihe der Ton. The overture to the Midsummer Night's Dream is a marvellous musical epitome of Shakespeare's play; and the comparative slightness and conventionality of its second theme closely correspond with Shakespeare's two pairs of lovers, though it does not illustrate their quarrels under the fairy spells.

Influence of Berlioz.—Berlioz made programme-music a vital issue in the 19th century. With an inextinguishable gift for voluminous composition he is utterly incapable of focussing his attention on either his music or his programme. The most trivial external detail may distract him at the height of his rhetoric. The moonshine and sentiment of the Scene d'amour, in his Romeo and Juliet symphony is charming; and the agitated sighing epi sodes which interrupt its flow, can be understood in the light of Shakespeare's balcony scene, if not by their musical sense. But when Berlioz thinks of the nurse knocking or calling at the door, he makes a realistic noise without either musical or dramatic purpose. It does not interrupt the duet, nor increase the emo tional tension, nor illustrate Juliet's artifices for gaining time, nor her agitation at the interruptions of the nurse. Perhaps this was the passage on which a lady once congratulated Berlioz for his vivid representation of Romeo arrivant dans son cabriolet. This piece of purely orchestral music has an introduction in which real voices are heard from convivial persons returning home from the ball. Berlioz complains that the public has no imagination and that therefore certain sections which presuppose an intimate knowledge of Shakespeare's play avec le denouement de Garrick should be omitted. But what the public lacks for these sections is neither imagination nor familiarity with Garrick-Shakespeare, but a capacity to take the butterfly vagaries of Berlioz's mind as their basis of reference.