Tratamiento de las muestras

dent opera shares with the drama of grace, and which, as the mythos of love or of sanctity, depletes the spiritual ontologies beyond any possible world-destiny, any continuing world-epic.

Third, however, the music innervated through us quietly sets a con­

straint on our activity; the dramatic sound "composes" further and even involves

an automatic dramatic outline.

Of course it has been hody disputed that sound can go that far. Pfitz­ ner for example completely separates isolated melodic elaboration from the total and substantiating tendency, which is of a poetic nature.

It undoubtedly sounds irresistible to say: If ! want to communicate the essence of some musical work, I simply whistle the first theme. If on the other hand I want to narrate the essence of a literary work, then I will cer­ tainly not cite the first sentence, but rather report the basic features of the plot or the layout of the whole. Just as a composer would appear absurd to us if he claimed to carry a sonata or symphony around in his head, without a single theme, so would a poet who wrote down verses or sen­ tences and claimed that here was a drama, although he did not yet know what would happen in it, although, in other words, its great, overriding idea had not yet occurred to him. The particular, then, is held to be the composer's special concern: this tiny, tangible unit, this inspired inven­ tion already beautiful and fully developed at birth, not needing to be stretched out into a symphony, its effect never changing through changes of context, is, according to Pfitzner, music's proper source of value. So in­ versely, the pervasive, the omnipresent is the poet's proper project: as what must first be achieved, as the great intangible unity or the inspired poetic idea, as it gradually, instead of being "composed," gradually precipitates and "condenses" and yet has value only as the binding element, an intu­

ition of the whole

substantiating

the particular. If these two so totally dif­

ferent modes of operation are thus to be successfully combined, what is fundamental about one art form must be emphasized and complemen­ tarily balanced out. Bad scores, then, would be those that already tried to be extensively narrative or even intellectual, and bad libretti those that ei­ ther �xcessively articulated the details or neglected to objectively ground the prot, in favor of a mere scaffolding in which to suspend duets, arias, and ensemble passages. The proper mission of music, then, according to Pfitzner, is to be accidental: music must relinquish the cultivation of au­ tonomous forms, the skillfully distributed filler of the symphonic work, which has abolished the former separation of invention and conventional

tutti

passages in favor of a uniformity of the whole, combined indistin­ guishably out of invention and reflection. Not for nothing has the history of musical forms had a chronic difficulty in accommodating the material of musical inspiration. Poetry's mission would then be, to be contentual: it must relinquish sensuous particularity, that is, make room for music, and provide it, as concisely as possible, often by displacing the plot into symbols, the fundamental moods as well as the dramatic substantiation, the necessity, and destiny from the realm, accessible only to poetry, of a logic of forms and complexes. Thus Pfitzner loves himself and Schumann, and plays the latter off against Liszt; thus

Der FreischiUz

and above all its Wolf's Glen music provide the archetype of the perfect opera: the basic problem of operatic composition has been solved, and Pfitzner believes that his idea of an as much musical as poetically elementary, that is, specifically musico-dramatic conception, avoids the dangerous complica­ tions of a music that itself wants to generate drama.

Much of this is as correct as it is astute, and it is inthesting how astute something incorrect can often be. For if it were as Pfitzner says, then ex­ actly the lesser and middling composers would have had the surest in­ stincts, the best ideas. There is certainly an empty, calculated kind of work, and a fraudulence that acts Beethovenian when nothing but vacuity

is apparent, where the thematic fabric is not even reflection, but rather has become just what the

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passages used to be, namely patterning. There are no less weighty objections even to Beethoven's arias: they become un­ sonorous, unlyrical, all too poor in voices, and hard to organically coun­ terpoint despite all their drive. Pfitzner equally has a point when he notes certain lifeless passages in Wagner where the recitative has nothing to say, because the text also has no drive, and where the leitmotif is inserted into the music not out of the purely symphonic necessity of a recapitulation, but only conceptually, as a sort of pedagogical point of orientation. How­ ever, if one would like to see this as confirmation of the perils of the bor­ der between music and drama, there should be this correction: that nei­ ther Schumann, nor Pfitzner, nor any other ingenuous, if highly reputable kind of composer who trusts in inspiration only to work up his brief mo­ ments of invention into the invention of the brief moment

pro domo,

but only Bruckner and Wagner made good "the sonata's responsibility to the ideal of music." One simply cannot somehow pass over Beethoven, and moreover there are precisely in Beethoven inventions which engender such movement, and especially expositions of these inventions, whose dialecti-

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