Having thus summarised the attitude of Wagner to Beethoven and to poetic music in general, let us proceed to fill in the details of the theory, allowing Wagner, wherever possible, to speak for himself.

He has set forth his views upon Beethoven with the greatest positiveness in his letters to Uhlig, and much more lucidly there than in Opera and Drama.[370] He saw in Beethoven\'s music the struggle to express a definite poetic idea in an abstract form that necessarily made the communication of the nature of the idea itself impossible. He always protested against the current fashion of performing Beethoven\'s symphonies as if they were nothing more than agreeable or exciting musical patterns. They were tone poems, and could mean nothing to the hearer unless the poetry at the core of them was made clear. "The essence of the great works of Beethoven," he writes to Uhlig, "is that they are only in the last place Music, but contain in the first place a poetic subject. Or shall we be told that this subject is only taken from music itself? Would not this be like saying that the poet takes his subject from speech, and the painter his from colour? The musical conductor who sees in one of Beethoven\'s tone-works nothing but the music, is exactly like a reciter who should hold only by the language of a poem, or the explainer of a picture who could not get beyond its colour. This, however, is the case with our conductors, even in the best instances—for many do not even so much as understand the music; they understand the key, the themes, the working of the parts, the instrumentation, and so on, and think that with these they understand the whole of the content of the tone-work."[371] And again: "The characteristic of the great compositions of Beethoven is that they are veritable poems, in which it is sought to bring a real subject to representation. The obstacle to their comprehension lies in the difficulty of finding with certainty the subject that is represented. Beethoven was completely possessed by a subject: his most significant tone pictures are indebted almost solely to the individuality of the subject that filled him; the consciousness of this made it seem to him superfluous to indicate his subject otherwise than in the tone picture itself. Just as our literary poets really address themselves only to other literary poets, so Beethoven, in these works, involuntarily addressed himself only to tone poets. The absolute musician, that is to say the manipulator of absolute music, could not understand Beethoven, because this absolute musician fastens only on the \'How,\' and not the \'What.\' The layman, on the other hand, could but be completely confused by these tone pictures, and at best only receive pleasure from that which to the tone poet was merely the material means of expression."[372]

Wagner recognised, however, the difficulty of grasping a poetic subject that had not been revealed by the composer, and held that it could only be divined by a poetic musician of the same kind. "If no special poetic subject is expressed in the tone speech, it may undoubtedly pass as easily understandable; for there can here be no question of real understanding. If, however, the expression of the tone speech is conditioned by a poetic subject, this speech at once becomes the most incomprehensible of all, unless the poetic subject be at the same time defined by some other means of expression than those of absolute music.

"The poetic subject of a tone piece by Beethoven is thus only to be divined by a tone poet; for, as I remarked before, Beethoven involuntarily appealed only to such, to those who were of like feelings, like culture, aye, well-nigh like capability with himself. Only a man like this can make these compositions intelligible to the laity, and above all by making the subject of the tone poem clear both to the executants and to the audience, and thus making good an involuntary error in the technique of the tone poet, who omitted this indication. Any other sort of performance of one of Beethoven\'s veritable tone poems, however technically perfect it may be, must remain incomprehensible in proportion as the understanding is not facilitated in the way I have suggested."[373]

This indeed, he held, was Beethoven\'s error—an error forced upon him by the conditions of his time—that he should endeavour to make his music truly human without giving the hearer the clue to the emotions upon which it was based. Beethoven\'s mistake, he says, in one of the happiest and most famous of his analogies, was the same as that of Columbus, who, though merely trying to find the way to the India that was already known, actually discovered thereby a new world.[374] His va............