CAPITULO 5. CARACTERIZACIÓN DE LAS COMUNIDADES DE
5.4. Comportamiento de los géneros de Ephemeroptera frente a los factores
and stomping opening chorus to
Tales of Hoffinann
seems to appear; music and text seem to "agree" absolutely nowhere in this unique master piece, nothing feels quite right. Or differently again, when a journeyman and then the students break off in the middle of the dance and announce the Meistersinger in fourths in a harmonically marvelous succession, as though the subject were not these complacent dignitaries but rather the entrance of the heavenly host. The voice of every great song, every deep
word-music, is like the voice of that ghostly traveler from Hoffman's
Kreis
leriana,
who tells of distant, unknown lands and peoples and strange destinies he has seen in his long travels, and whose speech finally "fades into a wonderful ringing, in which he spoke of unknown, most mysterious things, wordlessly but unmistakably."22 But such a thing requires that the music overtake the text, and so in terms of the whole, the level that has been set, can ultimately not intrude into the text's continuously visible el ement, because this whole lies beyond the literary whole. In terms of just this whole, one really cannot say that any literature could be inserted into music's dramatic space other than arbitrarily, could do more than ap proximate its indefinite demands; in a broader context the text certainly follows the music's mysterious, immoderate power of action, but with its demysti£Ying, more "logical" means, it cannot readily prove worthy of the musically required level. Even where the fourths might sound less dis tinctive, even where the scenic grounding has been placed higher than at
the mere opening of the
Meistersinger,
the available transcendent drama isalways poorer in implications than the music that prepares its own des
tinies, its mythos; and just this is the
true
boundary between the symphonic and the dramatic correlation.
Consequently the drive to translate something so remote back into everyday language can supply no meaning, not even in a hermeneutic re spect. Here, above all, the silliest things are said about some sonic item. They remind one-even Bekker, Beethoven's biographer, was justly re proached for it-of the worst commentaries on "the picture of the month" from the old
Gartenlaube.
Here the prattle about the expressive pleading of the 32nd notes, the merry laughter of the violin's trill, the uniso'h g# ringing out three times after the scherzo of the C# minor Quartet as if to ask: "Where am I going in this world?" -celebratesits
' widespread triumph. Here, with his explanatory chatter, lodges the smug philistine who believes not only to have said something, but to have set- . . ; tled the issue, when he summarizes the A major Symphony, in the magi-cal language of some
Guide to Music,
as "the Song of Songs of Dionysian heroism." Bekker raised the device by which piano teachers attempt to improve their students' feeble imaginations to the exegetical discipline of musical poetics: and all this can supposedly be found in Beethoven, worse, this is supposed to be the interpreted, conceptually clarified Bee thoven, this offensive stuff, where for every measure a little phrase is at the ready, next to which the most banal newspaper serialization reads likethe
Aeneid.
One can say it this way or that, and if Adolf Bernhard Marx,Beethoven's other biographer, explicates the course of action in the
Eroica
as an idealized battle-the first movement depicts the battle itself, the fu neral march depicts the night march across the battlefield, the scherzo is the cheerful and bawdy music of the camp, and the final movement de picts the eager, delighted homecoming to peacetime's joys and celebra tions-then this is not such a bad thing, since the music has absolutely nothing to do with it, and makes its profundity accessible to such sup plementary pictorial games according to popular precohceptions, though neither confirming nor denying them. On the other hand it remains ir relevant whether this or that composer necessarily thought he was de picting a jolly plowman. It does not help to investigate how much Bee thoven personally, whether inspired or subsequently appreciating his own work, seems to have encouraged such inept fabulating. Certainly he would claim in later years that an earlier time had been more "poetic":
"Everyone used to feel that the two sonatas of Opus no. 14 represented a dialog between two persons, because it just seems so obvious"; and we know how badly Beethoven wanted to give the earlier works poetic titles, in connection with just this complaint about the waning fantasy of mu sic lovers. No less
non /icet bovi
if Jupiter Wagner, poetry's fool, often put together the most arguable interpretations: thus, according to him, the andante of Mozart's G minor Symphony closes with a final testimonial to the bliss of a death through love, thus the surprising sweetness of the fi nale of theEroica
"symbolizes" the hero's consummation in love, whereas in the Prelude toLohengrin
a band of angels audibly bears the grail down ward-all interpretations of the most incidental, arbitrary sort belied by the totality of Wagner's genius itself. Consequently if Beethoven insisted that his Overture toDie Namensfeier were
not a composition but a poem, then this confusion of genres has to do first with the urge to be "intellec tual," closer to science (the same urge that led Goethe to value his poetryIIO
The Philosophy of Music
poetic as nothing but that digression among moods and enthusiasms, that "poetry" to which one always opposes prose, the prose of philistine, dreamless, unsymbolic life. However, Beethoven is no poet, he is less and more than a poet, and what the program symphony that apparently suc ceeded him has really added in terms of bleating sheep, sweltering sick rooms, ticking docks, roaring waterfalls, cool forests and other narrowly circumscribed, banal photographic captions, all now lets us identify the programmatic poetry as merely a springboard to the inner, imageless pathos, to the inmost wordlessness of music. So one must-without wanting to number among those who want to remain nothing but for mal and regard their epigonally received or produced formal residues as "absolute" music, while Hanslick and Herbart patrol the border against the indirect tradition-one must most decisively protest those program musical essays that bestow fake flesh and bone insofar as they issue inter polations of a sort incidental, regionally inferior to music, as a language above music, or as the translation into adequate categories of an art with which we can be intimate only as foreigners.23
But even a good text, the poetically valuable one, will necessarily fall short of the music. Thus it matters little if Wagner represents things, even historically, as if one had to proceed from the sound back to the text again, and not the other way. He will not let the sound have its say, nei
ther in the
Ring
nor in general fundamentally, theoretically, but rather resorts unconditionally to textual crutches instead of trusting in the not yet intuited, "eloquent," expressive futute of music. According to Wagner, music would have to seek to dissolve itself in drama at any price, just as instrumental music arose from the chorus, just as if absolute instrumen tal music were a fallen woman who, after the dialectical differentiation of the merely metallic sonorities, now longed for the word's return and syn thesis, the dissolution of its mere logogryph in a dramatically reinstated "chorus. "24 But then Wagner himself, who finds it so extraordinary when on the ruins of the librettist's art the composer should appear as the proper, true poet, says, disavowing his own theory: if one considers Bee
thoven's musical and Shakespeare's dramatic treatment of
Coriolanus,
then ''Shakespeare appears as just awaking though still dreaming Beetho
ven, and above him still this glow, this unbearable abundance, as the manifestation of the truly musical vision. But apart from that Wagner is also caught in a historical error; he overlooks the fact that the earliest op eras were already taking shape during the orchestra's exclusive flowering,
and what was later freed from the chorus and developed further within a particular instrumental form is no historical median, whose choric be ginning is supposed to return, after a dialectical reversal, as the dramatic ending; rather the chorus, notwithstanding the Florentine opera or any other, notwithstanding the musical drama and in spite of the brilliant de velopment of the orchestra that serves it, has absolutely remained the highest, most expressively powerful part of the orchestra, increasingly re linquishing any textual, program-musical, dramatic "logic," and remain ing the mightiest climax of the pure symphony flourishing alongside it. It is and will remain the destiny even of the better text, however, even the poetically most valuable one, even the most musically involved one, to be completely caught up in the music, to go begging before the sound.