STYLE IN MUSICAL AST 669 



from the music itself, and has more attention to spare for interesting 

 constructive features and subtleties of detail. In the just apportion- 

 ment of style for emotional and dramatic effects in theatrical music 

 and domestic music the resources are so different that they can hardly 

 be judged on the same footing. People who judge of what is dramatic 

 in the light of what is histrionic would hesitate to call anything dra- 

 matic which was in the true style of a solo song. But indeed there is 

 a just way of expressing tragedy, pathos, despair in the style suited to 

 solo song, and a different way of expressing it for the stage. The 

 opportunities of the one are more analytical and subtle, and of the 

 other more direct and sensational. It is by no means essential that 

 a thing shall be in histrionic style in order to justify a claim to being 

 dramatic. The histrionic style is a specialty which I hope to consider 

 more in detail another time. But so is the song style and both are 

 limited by the more delicate instinct of highly organized artistic beings 

 in such a way that much which would be admirable in one style is 

 positively vulgar in the other. 



But if the provinces of two different kinds of vocal music are so 

 strongly distinct, the differences between the style and even the ma- 

 terial of operatic music and pure instrumental music are more strik- 

 ing still. The differences of method are so pronounced that the his- 

 trionic and the absolute seem to represent distinct territories in the 

 musical art; and most people who call themselves musical live almost 

 entirely in one of them, and make little effort to appreciate the good 

 features of the other. It cannot be said that either party has all 

 the right on their side. It is quite true that people who are very 

 fond of the opera are most frequently not musical at all in any sense. 

 But there are a good many who really take it 'from the artistic point 

 of view and understand it, and are perfectly justified in objecting to 

 operas written in the style and with the methods belonging to instru- 

 mental music. 



On the other hand, it may fairly be said that men of high artistic 

 taste and perception, habituated to the purer style of absolute instru- 

 mental music, are not altogether liberal in their judgment of operatic 

 music, and are not sufficiently ready to admit what is admirably de- 

 vised for its conditions. They are apt to fall into the misconception 

 that because certain principles of form and procedure are almost 

 indispensable to instrumental music, any music in which they do 

 not find them is necessarily bad. In this connection it is impossible 

 not to think of the violent antipathy which Wagner's style produced 

 in men of intelligence and cultivated taste. His mature style was 

 certainly as strcngly different from that of composers of instrumental 

 music as it is possible to conceive. It was the product of a disposi- 

 tion more essentially dramatic and poetically imaginative than mus- 

 ical. It repelled musicians who appreciated highly the time-honored 

 methods of art which had been consecrated by the greatest masters of 



