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cal drama, commencing in the tension of these thematic "inventions," ap­

pertains purely to this music's dramatic element itself. As music that needs

symphonic space, and remove, in order to be this kind of music, and to which time, which bears it forward and is involved in it, already suggests a generative total vision of at least the individual movement if not the en­

tire symphony. Indeed, even the composer of the

Freischutz

and particu­

larly the Wolf's Glen music praised by Pfitzner as especially individually and determinedly melodic-even Weber feels so little in accord with Pfitzner's theory that he can remark in an aphorism, quite symphonically:

"While reading a poem, everything presses by the soul more quickly; a few words suffice to change the emotions, to define them. The composer can­ not work the same way; his language needs longer accents, and the passage from one feeling into another puts many obstacles in his way." One could likewise say: if the antipathy to longer forms is really to be emphatically musical, then symphonic prolongation has still shattered more forms than the accretion of musical invention. One must finally reply to Pfitzner's nominalism that the sonata and the corresponding birth of Wagnerian drama from the spirit of the symphony represent not only a husk, one of the belated, interesting, chronic difficulties in accommodating the mater­ ial of musical invention, but rather the totally legitimate body of a partic­ ular

melos

and its equally generative, inspiriting, dramatically definitive counterpoint.

In other words, to try to find the right words for music's power of ac­

tion: here the sound truly

draws,

growing in flight, while the word just

falls. If one merely observes how just a good song originates, one notices how little the mere particularities are enlivened. Thus in Pfitzner himself, in Hugo Wolf, in Bach and Wagner, the music is adapted only superfi­ cially to the text, with no intention of occurring only atomistically, as it

were.

An

utter focus on the essential is at work here, such that, in Rudolf

Louis's apt observation about Hugo Wolf, the whole piece is spun out in an overridingly absolutely musical development, as it does not so much take up the particularities of the text and its emotional immediacies, but rather keeps to a basic mood from the beginning or from the course of the text, which is then realized as music and laid out as the accompanying polyphony of this essential, basic mood. This mood is a limit, of course, but a limit precisely against the particular, and therefore a clear relation­ ship to the whole, into which the poetry of a song or even an opera must now, conversely, introduce its particularity. For there need not always

dominate, as in Pfitzner's

Palestrina,

such a stylistic difference between the

lyrical visions of the first act and the merely querulous counterpoint of the council scene of the second; there is temperament, but above that there is

also a mysticism of the

journey

and of

time.

As little as one should con­

tentually overestimate symphonic accompaniment's power to set the plot,

there is just as certainly, beginning with

Fidelio,

a purely musical compul­

sion that not only follows the plot by means of melismatic-symphonic an­

imation, but itself produces plot, as yet undefined, nameless plot, the air,

the tempo, the mood, the ground, the level, the dark, flickering, supra­ conscious, magical, mythical background to the plot, arbitrary in its par­

ticulars but constrained as a whole, into which the theatrically meaning­

ful application and the as it were textual "grounding" that mimics it only

on a lower level now have to be inserted. It goes without saying that here

a concise, conspicuous action, often made legible through. symbols, is

worth more than a drama shaped in complete disregard for the music;

that Schiller's

Kabale und Liebe,

in other words, provides a more ques­

tionable libretto than a Strau6-Hofmannsthal consultative project or the

dramas that Wagner developed completely

secundum rem musicalem,

pre­

cisely insofar as neither the particular fullness, nor theoretically the more

mysterious depth of the musical drama, can tolerate no prefabricated, no purely poetically formed drama.

Fourth,

however, even the verbal totality of the plot is thus latently overtaken by the note that first sounds with us, the subjectively suffused note.

A poor text is already easy to disrupt in itself. It is superfluous, and wherever it appears it makes itself laughable next to the music which it wants to clarify, whose mood it wants to breathe out.

It is especially not groundless that nearly everything becomes too lofty when sung, that in opera even the poorest boatman rows with a golden oar. No one understands all that stuff about the poisonous ring or Emma's ghost, but Weber's music almost makes meaningful literature out of Eur­

yanthe. Elsewhere the illusion goes so far that Pamina begins to seem like

Beatrice, that all the

Magic Flute's cheap stage tricks appear as occult vi­

sions, just because Mozart's music deepens the mere theatricality and the superficial antagonisms, and traces them back to those theosophical actu­ alities which in Schikaneder's text had become even more confusing, if not entirely nonsensical. It is also not groundless that one should be star­ tled at a students' drinking song, which is how the truly hellishly driving

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