Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/227

 what should we want with these tyrannous paraphernalia? An orchestra that bears resemblance to speech, not to a tempest, is what suits us. "Oh," cried Nietzsche, "that orchestration of Wagner, I call it the sirocco!"

If, nevertheless, too many of our musicians have allowed themselves to be drawn by Wagner's example into this clumsy debauch of an orchestration that is overloaded, intrusive, ruthless, "obese" as someone has called it, which draws all attention on itself, crushing the dramatic and moral element, crushing the intellectual charm, crushing all grace, then what follows is inevitable. As far as general culture, reason and taste are concerned these artists have fallen far below the level that becomes French artists; French nature, which is either cultivated or ceases to exist, has become atrophied in them, and there is left nothing natural about them.

The stories that they will be able to put into music will be stories that have nothing human in them. The men and women whom they will put on the stage will have nothing of humanity but its outward shape; they will be phantoms, phantoms that speak and move it is true, but without any motive for doing so that could appeal to us. The kind of thing that Wagner sings, and sings with sincerity and eloquence, we cannot sing with sincerity because of our civilisation. I would deal in exactly the same way with the question of the leit-motiv. It is a big question, but is completely elucidated by what I have just said. Wagner's claim to have invented the leit-motiv has been disputed. That is an error. Musicians have always made more or less use of the repetition of formulae; but no one previously had done so (this