Opera and Drama - Introduction to Part II
Derrick Everett
INTRODUCTION TO PART II
When Lessing laboured in his "Laocöon" to discover and map out the
bounds of poetry and painting, he had in his eye that poetry which
was already mere description (Schilderei). He starts from lines of
comparison and demarcation which he draws between the plastic group
portraying the scene of Laocöon's death-struggle, and that
description of the same scene as sketched by Virgil in his "Æneid,"
an epos written for silent reading. Though in the course of his
inquiry Lessing touches on Sophocles, he has only in mind the
literary Sophocles, such as alone exists for us; or, if he takes
into his purview the poet's tragic artwork in all its life of actual
performance, he instinctively places it outside any comparison with
the works of sculpture or painting: since not the living tragic
artwork is bounded as against these plastic arts, but these,
compared with that, find in their straitened natures their necessary
bounds. Wherever Lessing sets up limits and boundaries for poetry,
he does not mean the dramatic artwork directly brought before the
senses by physical performance, that artwork which sums in itself
each factor of the plastic arts, in highest potence such as it alone
can reach, and by its power has first brought to these their higher
potentiality of artistic life; but he means the exiguous phantom of
this artwork: the narrating, depicting, literary poem, appealing to
the imagination and not the senses; the form in which that force of
imagination has been turned into the virtual performer, toward which
the poem merely acts as stimulus.
Such an artificial art, it is true, can only produce an effect at
all by the exactest observance of boundaries and limits, since she
must be ever on her watch to guard the unlimited force of
imagination -- which has here to play the performer's rôle in place
of her -- from any bewildering digression, and thus to guide it to
the one fixed point at which she can display her purposed object as
definitely and distinctly as possible. But it is to the force of
imagination alone, that all the egoistically severed arts address
themselves; and especially the plastic art, which can only bring
into play the weightiest moment of art, namely motion, by appealing
to the imagination. All these arts merely suggest: an actual
representation would to them be possible only could they parley with
the universality of man's artistic receptivity, could they address
his entire sentient (sinnlichen) organism, and not his force of
imagination; for the true artwork can only be engendered by an
advance from imagination into actuality, i.e. physicality
(Sinnlichkeit).
Lessing's honest endeavour to map out the boundaries of those
severed art-varieties, which can no longer directly represent but
merely figure (schildern), is foolishly misunderstood to-day by
those to whom the huge difference between those arts and the one
veritable art remains a thing incomprehensible. Inasmuch as they
keep before their eye these separate art-varieties alone, all
powerless in themselves for a direct impersonation, they naturally
can only assign to each of these arts -- and thus (as they must
deem) to art in general -- the task of overcoming with as little
disturbance as possible the difficulty of giving the force of
imagination a firm leverage in their figuring. To heap the means of
this their figuring, can only confuse the figuring itself -- with
which I quite agree -- and by distressing or distracting the
imagination through the presentation of disparate means, can only
turn it from a full grasp of the object.
Purity of the art-variety is therefore the first requisite for its
comprehensibility, whereas an alloy (Mischung) from other art-
varieties can only foul this comprehensibility. In fact we can
imagine nothing more bewildering, than if the painter, for instance,
should want to show his subject in motion such as can be depicted by
the poet alone; the acme of repulsiveness, however, we find in a
painting where the poet's verses are written as issuing from some
person's mouth. When the musician -- i.e. the absolute musician --
attempts to paint, he brings-about neither music nor a painting; but
if he wanted to accompany with his music the inspection of an actual
painting, then he might be quite sure that no one would understand
either the painting or his music. He who can only conceive the
combination of all the arts into the artwork as though one meant,
for example, that in a picture-gallery and amidst a row of statues a
romance of Goethe's should te read aloud while a symphony of
Beethoven's was being played, such a man does rightly enough to
insist upon the severance of the arts, and to wish each part left to
help itself to the plainest possible depicting of its subject in its
own way. But, that our modern state-æstheticians should rank the
drama also as an art-variety, and as such assign it to the poet for
his special property, in the sense that the blending with it of
another art, like that of music, would need apology but could by no
means gain acquittal; this is to draw from Lessing's definition a
conclusion for which there is not one trace of support in the
original. These people, however, see in drama nothing but a branch
of literature, as much a species of poesy as the romance or didactic
poem; only differing in that, instead of being merely read, it is to
be learnt by rote by several persons, declaimed, accompanied with
gestures, and lit up by the footlights. To be sure, to the stage
performance of a literary drama its musical embellishment would bear
almost the same relation as though it were executed in presence of
an painting upon an easel, and therefore the so-called melodrama has
been branded as a genre of most pernicious medley. But this drama,
the only one our literarians have in mind, is just as little a true
drama as a clavichord is an orchestra, to say nothing of a troupe of
singers. The literary drama owes its origin to the same egoistic
spirit of our general art-development as does the clavichord, and by
the latter will I endeavour to make plain this course in brief.
The oldest, truest, most beautiful organ of music, the organ to
which alone our music owes its being, is the human voice. The most
naturally was it counterfeited by the wind-instrument, and this
again by the stringed instrument: the symphonic concord of an
orchestra of wind and strings, again, was counterfeited by the
organ; the unweildy organ, in its turn, was replaced by the handy
clavichord. The most noticeable thing in this march of events, from
the primal organ of the human voice to the clavichord, is the
sinking of music to an ever greater lack of expression. The
instruments of the orchestra, though they had already lost the
articulations (Sprachlaut) of the human voice, were still able to
sufficiently counterfeit the human tone, in its endless variety and
lively alternation of expressional power; the organ-pipes could only
retain this tone in respect of its duration, but no longer of its
changeable expression; till at last the clavichord merely hinted at
this tone itself, and left its actual body to be thought-out by the
ear's imagination. Thus in the clavichord we have an instrument
which does nothing more than delineate music.
But how came it, that the musician finally contented himself with a
toneless instrument? From no other ground than a desire to make
music for himself alone, without any mutual aid from others. The
human voice, which intrinsically requires the use of speech, to
pronounce itself melodically, is an individual; only the concurrence
of several such individuals, can produce symphonic harmony. The wind
and stringed instruments stood near the human voice in this degree,
that they alike retained that individual character, whereby each of
them possessed a definite, however richly variable a colour, and for
the production of harmonic effects they were likewise forced to work
together. In the Christian organ all these living individualities
were already ranged into a register of dead pipes, which raised
their mechanical voices to the glory of God at the masterful
key-tread of the one and indivisible performer. On the clavichord at
last the virtuoso, without so much as the help of another (the
organ-player had still required a bellows-blower), could set a
multitude of hammers a-clattering to his private glory; for the
hearer, deprived of all delight from music's tone, was only left the
entertainment of bewondering the keyboard-hitter's skill. Assuredly,
our whole modern art is like the clavichord: in it each part does
the work of a community, but alas! in abstract and in tonelessness.
Hammers -- but no men!
>From the standpoint of the clavichord let us follow back the
literary drama, whose doors our æsthetes bar with such puritanic
pride against the noble breath of music; let us follow it back to
the origin of this clavichord; and what do we find? We find at last
the living tone of human speech, which is one and the same with the
singing tone, and with out which we should have known neither
clavichord nor literary drama.
(Tr. W.A. Ellis, with some corrections and changes for readability)
--
Derrick Everett
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