Music and meaning

In his autobiography, published in 1936, Igor Stravinsky asserted that

This view of music – its nature, limits, and impact on the senses and intellect – was controversial, but not new. Twenty years earlier, author Jean Cocteau, composer Erik Satie, and impresario Sergei Diaghilev collaborated to produce the ballet Parade, a conscious experiment in non-expressive, non-meaning art. Sixty years before that, critic Eduard Hanslick professed that “the content of music are forms moving in sound.” And almost a half-century earlier, the writer E.T.A. Hoffmann voiced preference for instrumental music, “which scorns all aid, all admixture of other arts – and gives pure expression to its own peculiar artistic nature … [It] leaves behind all feelings circumscribed by intellect in order to embrace the inexpressible.”

Given that many of the expressive devices found in instrumental music in the second half of the eighteenth century were first tested and approved on the operatic stage, it was natural that the opera overture soon became one of the main sites for significant programmatic innovation. In the famous preface to the printed score of his “reform opera,” Alceste, from 1769, Christoph Willibald Gluck stressed how “the overture ought to apprise the spectators of the nature of the action that is to be represented and to form, so to speak, its argument.” Writing over seventy years later, Richard Wagner pinpointed the aesthetic difference between the sectional, mono-expressive overture before Gluck, and those that subsequently “weld[ed] the isolated sections to a single undivided whole, whose movement [was] sustained by just the contrast of those different characteristic motives.” Accordingly, outstanding examples of the poly-characteristic opera overture resolved “the conflict between [opposing] musical themes in a manner analogous to the resolution of the drama in question.” Yet the most outstanding overtures went even further, Wagner argues, by shedding the claustrophobic mandate to analogously reenact and resolve the upcoming stage work in favor of creating self-sustaining, independent instrumental dramas. And while he singled out notable examples in the history of the opera overture’s development since Gluck – including W. A. Mozart, Luigi Cherubini, and Carl Maria von Weber – for Wagner the epitome of the dramatic overture was Ludwig van Beethoven, whose concert overtures not only heavily influenced the composition of the overtures or preludes to Wagner’s own operas from the period, such as Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin, but also the single-movement dramatic or poetic overtures of Beethoven’s contemporaries.

Mendelssohn’s Scottish complex and Liszt’s German Hungaria

On 7 August 1829, from the town of Tobermory in the Scottish Inner Hebrides, Felix Mendelssohn dispatched a letter to his family that contained the first twenty-one measures of what would become his “Hebrides” Overture. The next day he and his traveling companion, Karl Klingemann, sought out Fingal’s Cave, a picturesque destination made popular by James Macpherson’s “translations” from the 1760s of the ancient Scots-Gaelic bard Ossian. Composition and revision occupied Mendelssohn for more than five years after his visit to the Hebrides, and he never did settle on a definitive title for one of his most admired orchestral works: On 11 December 1830 he described the work as an Ouverture zur einsamen Insel (Overture to the Solitary Island), five days later as Die Hebriden (The Hebrides); it was premiered by the Philharmonic Society in London on 14 May 1832 as The Isles of Fingal, a title Mendelssohn also sanctioned for the London publication sixteen months later of the four-hand piano arrangement. On the continent, however, that same edition appeared as Ouverture aux Hébrides (Fingals Höhle) (Overture to the Hebrides [Fingal’s Cave]). Orchestral parts appeared in June 1834 for Die Hebriden, while the full score from April 1835 advertised itself as Die Fingals-Höhle. However, one constant among the myriad titles Mendelssohn vetted is his subject matter’s exotic distance from its intended European audience. Indeed, few figures captivated readers (and listeners) as forcefully in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: A long-dead, quasi mythic poet (Ossian) chronicles the deeds of his father (Fingal) in a mysterious, long-abandoned realm (Fingal’s Cave) in a remote part of the Western world (the Hebrides).

Writing of the contemporary Austro-German musical landscape in 1912, the Munich-based critic and theorist Rudolf Louis posited three competing tendencies among composers of instrumental music: “the first, program-musical tendency leads via Berlioz and Liszt to Richard Strauss; the second, diametrically opposed direction leads via Schumann to Max Reger; and the third, which in a certain sense mediates between them, leads to Gustav Mahler.”

Louis’s valiant efforts in creating a stylistic taxonomy of music fall short vis-à-vis program music. His Strauss–Reger–Mahler trichotomy seeks to extend the philosophical divisions of the 1850s, which, as Chapter 5 contends, were at best practiced inconsistently by composers who often fled from one camp to the other – a situation perhaps implicitly acknowledged by Louis, who enlists Schumann on Reger’s behalf. Similarly, none of the contemporary composers mentioned by Louis (including Mahler, who had recently died) can be confined to any single category. Even Strauss, the public face of program music by the century’s end, routinely equivocated on the degree to which his music should assert programmatic agendas. Perhaps the single element that binds together composers active around the fin de siècle is an uneasy sense of place in history, for their compositions are as much about breaking away from tradition as they are about maintaining it.

In a review from December 1899 of Hector Berlioz’s recently published “private letters” (“lettres intimes”), Camille Saint-Saëns tried to put his finger on what made Berlioz, who had been dead thirty years yet whose position in French music was still being fiercely debated, tick:

Saint-Saëns admits that Berlioz was perhaps too Romantic for his own good, having let himself get immersed in the fictional worlds of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Shakespeare, and Lord Byron to the detriment of his reputation and personal life. The criticism, of course, says as much about Saint-Saëns’s musical aesthetics as it does Berlioz’s (see Chapter 9); but the reviewer nevertheless hits the nail on the head when, in a more extended consideration from the same year, he characterizes Berlioz as “a paradox made flesh.”

Toward a “Beethoven of the future”: Liszt’s “Dante” Symphony

In early 1839, Franz Liszt began to plan symphonic compositions based on Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust. By the end of the year, he had written in a public letter to Hector Berlioz that “Dante has found his pictorial expression in Orcagna and Michelangelo, and someday perhaps he will find his musical expression in the Beethoven of the future.” The ensuing decade of intense concertizing meant that he would not be able to realize his plans in earnest until the 1850s, but in the interim he was able to devote considerable energy to a piano piece eventually published as “Après une lecture du Dante – Fantasia quasi Sonata” in Book 2 (“Italy”) of the Années de pèlerinage (1858). During its long gestation, Liszt assigned it various titles: “Fragment dantesque” (1839); “Paralipomènes [Postscript] à la Divina Commedia: Fantaisie Symphonique pour Piano” (c.1848); and “Prolégomènes [Preliminary Discourse] … ” (c.1852).

In good programmatic fashion, the work references, but does not directly cite, two ostensibly incompatible models: Victor Hugo’s poem, “Après une lecture de Dante” (“After Reading Dante”), and Ludwig van Beethoven’s two piano sonatas, op. 27, each a “sonata quasi fantasia.” Hugo distills the thirty-three cantos of Dante’s Hell into almost as many lines of poetry (see Text Box 5.1), and Beethoven – especially in op. 27, no. 1 – infuses sonata structures with spontaneous, improvisational outbursts. Along the same lines as its models, Liszt’s “Dante” Sonata is both poetic and musical gloss, offering “a reading of the Dante” – note the definite article – by way of elaborate thematic transformations and elastic formal structures akin to the Piano Sonata in B minor and Les Préludes.

As the surrounding chapters chronicle, Homer, Ovid, William Shakespeare, Lord Byron, and dozens of other writers produced hundreds, probably thousands, of works of literature that enjoyed second lives in music during the common practice period. However, arguably no single literary work has attracted a greater number of musicians than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s closet drama Faust. While it has inspired several operatic adaptations since its publication in the early nineteenth century, along with numerous scores of incidental music written to accompany the play, Faust is notable for its manifold transformations – in whole or part – into overtures, symphonies, symphonic poems, sonatas, ballets, cantatas, choruses, and solo songs by composers as stylistically diverse and chronologically separate as Franz Schubert, Hector Berlioz, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Charles-Valentin Alkan, Gustav Mahler, Ferruccio Busoni, Lili Boulanger, Igor Stravinsky, and Alfred Schnittke. Moreover, in attempting to assimilate and occasionally depart from Goethe’s complex stage drama and other elements of the Faustian legend, many of these composers also expanded the limits of music’s programmatic potential. This chapter identifies common strands and divergent paths taken in that pursuit.

Goethe’s Faust: origins, themes, legacy

Goethe did not invent the tale of Faust, but rather drew upon a corpus of Faustian stories and legends – some of which went back more than two centuries – that had long since become part of German and, to a lesser extent, European folklore. In fact, the crux of Goethe’s play can be traced back to the anonymous Historia von D. Johann Fausten, published by Johann Spies at Frankfurt am Main in 1587. Here the brilliant physician and theologian Doctor Faustus, motivated by a “godless and reckless resolve,” enters into a pact with a devil named Mephistopheles. In exchange for his soul, Faustus receives twenty-four years of limitless abilities, allowing him to accumulate (forbidden) knowledge, wealth, success, and companionship. Toward the end of the book, with his life almost at an end, Faustus attempts reconciliation with God but fails. At the appointed hour, a tempest descends on his locked chambers. The next day, friends and students find Faustus’s still twitching mangled corpse strewn across a dung heap outside.

In February 1848, the celebrated pianist Franz Liszt assumed his duties full time as Kapellmeister at Weimar, the capital of the Grand Duchy of Saxe-Weimar. Over the previous decade, Liszt had enjoyed some of his most important artistic successes in Paris, Vienna, Berlin, London, Pest, St. Petersburg, and even Constantinople; thus his decision to move to a small town of around twelve thousand citizens must have struck many of his contemporaries as a demotion. But Weimar’s physical size was in inverse proportion to its reputation, as the city could boast of an illustrious group of philosophers, writers, and musicians – including Johann Gottfried Herder, Friedrich Schiller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Johann Nepomuk Hummel – who had transformed the cultural landscape of Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

In the course of giving well over one thousand concerts since the late 1830s, Liszt had established himself as an unparalleled virtuoso pianist. By retiring from the hectic life of the concert performer and settling into a routine of composing, conducting, and teaching at Weimar, however, he inaugurated a self-described period of “collection and creation” that he hoped would not only turn Weimar into a “New Athens,” but also put him on par with the cultural elite of the city’s illustrious past. Indeed, by the time he left Weimar for Rome in late 1861 to begin yet another phase in his professional life, Liszt had produced most of his best-known works: the definitive versions of the “Paganini” and “Transcendental” Études, the Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, the first two books of the Années de pèlerinage, the Piano Sonata in B minor, the Faust and “Dante” Symphonies, and a dozen symphonic poems. Yet no less important is how many of these compositions also document his wide-ranging exploration of how to effect an ideal unification of poetry and music – in other words, how to compose programmatically. His output, and to a lesser extent that of Richard Wagner and select students, comprise the core repertory of German program music at mid-century.

In his massive Musikalisches Lexikon, the German theorist Heinrich Christoph Koch described the curious, niche genre of “Simphonies à programmes,” or “programmatic symphonies,” as follows:

Published in 1802, the Lexikon sits at a crossroads: It assesses numerous developments in music of the recent past, especially the last fifty years, in which the symphony and string quartet came into their own, serious opera underwent radical reforms, and music had abandoned affect and mimesis in favor of sentiment and rhetoric. At the same time, Koch’s tome anticipates many of the issues that would occupy musicians and critics for the rest of the nineteenth century and even beyond, including the relationship between poetry and music, the aesthetic and social position of instrumental music (especially in relation to opera), and the role of folk and national music in the arts, among others.

On 19 July 1870, the Second French Empire, led by Napoleon III, declared war on the Kingdom of Prussia and its German allies. Tensions between the two groups had escalated dramatically in the last ten years, in which France, whose general geographical boundaries had remained unchanged for centuries, grew increasingly wary of Prussia’s aggressive efforts in expanding its borders, particularly following its success against the Austrians in the short-lived Austro-Prussian War of 1866. Despite such omens, Napoleon III thought that a war against the Prussians would be quick and decisive. Yet his defeat and capture at the Battle of Sedan on 1 September 1870 ended his reign, his empire, and any prospects for French military success on the continent for a generation to come. Indeed, while fighting would continue into the next year, the Prussians had won the war at Sedan, which paved the way to German unification on 18 January 1871. For the French, the irony was bitter: Napoleon I’s military campaigns had destroyed the First Reich in 1806; Napoleon III’s miscalculations two generations later helped to create the Second.

Many of France’s musicians had also been concerned by another German threat: the rising tide of interest in Richard Wagner’s operas. Wagner himself had overseen a production of his opera Tannhäuser that flopped at the Paris Opéra in March 1861, and his grand opera Rienzi was featured at the Théâtre-Lyrique in 1869 with only slightly better results. Nevertheless, while these two operas hardly represented Wagner’s more recent fare (especially the music drama Tristan und Isolde), they were enough to plant the seeds of French Wagnerism, the shoots of which threatened to choke almost every new French opera for the remainder of the century. On top of that, Hector Berlioz’s death in 1869 meant that France was without a major composer of orchestral instrumental music.