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The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII by Various

V >> Various >> The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII




There is still another fact connected with this. Haendel's operas seem to
us concert-like; the arias of Bach's church cantatas often appear
operatic. Many numbers of these cantatas would disturb us today in
church; on the other hand we consider them exquisite religious parlor
music--which they were far from being in Bach's day. We are no longer
such a vehemently excitable generation religiously as to be able to
endure Bach's music to its full extent in church; on the other hand, as
individuals, in the family, in society we are infinitely more vehemently
excitable and much higher tuned spiritually as well than were those of
the eighteenth century; we want Bach in the concert hall and in the
parlor. The pious and yet forcible leader of St. Thomas' Choir has been
made a parlor musician by us and for us--but for his own generation he
was not one.

In the last hundred years the compass of pitch of almost all instruments
has been considerably enlarged in the treble. The high registers in
which every ordinary violinist must be able to play nowadays would in
those days have seemed too break-neck for the foremost virtuosos. Men
themselves were not tuned high enough to take pleasure in such poignant
chirping. The flute of the seventeenth century was a fourth lower than
that of the eighteenth. In the flute and the piccolo of the nineteenth
century we have again risen a third, yes, an entire octave above the
eighteenth century! Our great-grandfathers called the bass flute _flauto
d'amore_, the alto oboe, _oboe d'amore_, a bass viol, _viola d'amore_,
because their ear found preferably in the deep middle tones the
character of the tender, the sweet, and the languishing. Now we can
scarcely play on the violin or wind instrument a love melody which does
not rise two or three octaves above the normal.

The standard Italian song-composers of the first half of the last
century were especially fond of using the middle register for tones
expressive of peculiarly dramatic pathos, as well as for powerful final
passages of arias. Our differently tuned ear demands that these tones of
passion shall, as a rule, be as high as possible. The alto voice as a
solo voice has almost entirely disappeared from the operas in which it
formerly played so conspicuous a part. The elevated tone of our whole
inner man has deprived us of any ear for the alto.

In any case we have here reached an extreme which is contrary to the
very construction of the human vocal organs. Scarcely is moderate and
natural compass of tone still permitted, even in a song. In every age
the song-composer had been allowed to construct his melodies out of the
fewest possible tones. While the elder Bach in his arias often chases
the human voice in the most ruthless manner from one extreme to the
other, his sons and pupils in their little German songs confine
themselves to the most modest compass. Most of the later composers
proceeded in the same way up to the time of the Romanticists; then the
bonds were snapped, even in this respect. Schubert, on the one hand,
could compose the most moderate songs, on the other, the most
immoderate. It often seems (and this is also the case with Beethoven)
that his fantasy rebelled against the fact that a curb was placed upon
it by the natural limitation of the human voice.

This natural limitation, however, is once for all not to be done away
with, and it is ignored only at the expense of feasibility. Some later
Romanticists, therefore, such as Spohr and Mendelssohn, came back
immediately to the comfortable middle register as the real vocal
register of song. The thirst for shrill sounds had made men entirely
forget that a song must be easy to sing just because it must always be
sung suggestively and never be delivered with full dramatic execution.
Do not our singers, who since Schubert's time are so fond of making a
song a dramatic scene, feel how ridiculous it would be if a reader
should declaim a song at the top of his voice like the dialogue of a
drama?

In the invaluable privilege of writing for a moderate compass, a
song-composer, almost alone of all composers, is provided with a means
of reacting gradually upon instrumental music and of tuning anew the ear
of our generation, so that it shall no longer find satisfaction in the
shrill tones of extreme voice registers and the euphony of strong,
easily and comfortably attained middle tones shall again be universally
perceived. At the present moment our instrumental art has, in this
particular, fallen under the tyranny of piano manufacturers and makers
of wind instruments. When the keyboard of the grand piano has been made
longer by a few keys, the composers think they are remaining "behind the
times" if they do not immediately introduce these new high treble tones
into their next work, and when the wind instruments have been enriched
by several new valves and regulators the scores immediately grow in
proportion to these keys and pistons. But does art feel no shame at
having thus fallen under the dominion of trade!

The ear of the eighteenth century preferred human voices whose _timbre_
approached closest to the violin, the oboe or the 'cello, and considered
that such were peculiarly fitted for lyric and dramatic expression. The
eunuch sings as if he had an oboe in his throat; it is much too harsh
and lacking in brilliancy for our ear, which values incomparably higher
the more brilliant, clearer _timbre_, corresponding to the tone of the
flute, clarinet, or horn. The favorite _timbre_ of the eighteenth
century compares with that of the nineteenth as dull oxidized gold does
with that brightly polished. The period of the Romanticists marks here
too the turning-point of taste; Beethoven completed the emancipation of
the above-mentioned wind instruments in the symphony. The modern
treatment of the piano with the introduction of the perfect chord
accelerated its victory at the same time. It worked favorably for the
external brilliancy of tone of this instrument, while gradually closing
the ears of the dilettante and the musician to the charms of a simple
but characteristic management of the voice in accordance with the rules
of counterpoint. Thus the layman nowadays has seldom an ear for the
subtleties of the string quartet, whereas, on the other hand, our
great-grandfathers would indubitably have run away from the sound of our
brass bands and military music. The earlier symphonies, since they were
essentially intended to bring out the effects of the stringed
instruments, now seem like darkened pictures. Yet the symphonies have
certainly remained unchanged; only our ear has grown dull so far as
comprehension of the tone-color of the string quartet is concerned. The
same full orchestra, which in those works sounded so overpoweringly
imposing seventy years ago, now sounds to us simply powerful. In such
symphonies, in order to sharpen our ears, which have become dulled in
this respect, we have arrived at the strange necessity of doubling the
parts of the stringed instruments in a simple wind instrument
_ensemble_, so as to attain the same effect which old masters attained
with a simple distribution of the string parts.

The characterization of musical keys is very strange. In different ages
an entirely different capacity of expression, often an exactly opposite
color, has been attributed to each separate key. In the eighteenth
century G-major was still a brilliant, ingratiating, voluptuous
key--indeed, in the seventeenth century, Athanasius Kircher goes so far
as to call it _tonum voluptuosum_. We, on the contrary, consider G-major
particularly modest, naive, harmless, faintly-colored, simple, even
trivial. Aristotle ascribes to the Dorian key, which corresponds
approximately to our D-minor, the expression of dignity and constancy;
five hundred years later Athaenaeus also calls this key manly,
magnificent, majestic. D-minor, therefore, had for the ear of the
ancient world about the same character that C-major has for us. That is
indeed a jump _a dorio ad phrygium_.

What, however, was for the ancients not proverbially, but literally, a
jump _a dorio ad phrygium_--namely, the contrast between D-minor and
E-minor--is for us no longer such a very astonishing antithesis. In the
seventeenth century Prinz finds the same Dorian key--which for Aristotle
bore the stamp of dignity and constancy--as D-minor, not only "grave"
but also "lively and joyous, reverent and temperate." This key conveys
to Kircher's ear the impression of strength and energy. For Matheson it
possesses "a pious, quiet, large, agreeable and contented quality,"
which encourages devotion and peace of mind, and, for that matter, may
also be employed to express pleasure. On the other hand, since Ch. P.
Schubert's theoretical procedure and since the use Gluck and Mozart have
made of D-minor in dramatic practice, the modern esthetic critic finds
the stamp of womanly melancholy, dark brooding, deep anxiety, in the
selfsame key which for a former age was the _tonus primus_, the one
particularly expressive of manly dignity and strength. And, to cap the
climax, the ear of the musical Romanticist of our day has become quite
accustomed also to hear in D-minor devilish rage and revengeful fury, as
well as all sorts of demoniacal terror and dreadful, midnight, musical
vampirism, as, for example, we find the Queen of Night giving vent in
D-minor to the "hellish revenge" which boils in her heart, and in the
_Freischuetz_ hell triumphs in D-minor. In the seventeenth century,
Sethus Calvisius, speaking of C-major, the Ionian key, says it was
formerly a favorite key for love songs and therefore had acquired the
reputation of being a somewhat wanton and lewd melody; in his day, on
the contrary, it resounded clear, warlike, and was used to lead the
warriors in battle. The victoriously joyful battle hymn of the
Protestant church, "A mighty fortress is our God," is therefore in the
Ionian key. Calvisius himself is, however, puzzled at this incredible
transformation in the conception of the selfsame thing, and adds that
one is almost inclined to suspect that what is now known as the Ionian
key was formerly called the Phrygian, and _vice versa_. The fact is,
however, that the names have not changed--it is the ear which has
changed. If before Calvisius C-major was the erotic key, in the
seventeenth century G-major was considered so; in the eighteenth, on the
contrary, when love poetry jumps from the merry and playful over to the
sentimental, the musical ear likewise altered accordingly, and even
before the time of Werther and Siegwart the languishing, gently
melancholy G-minor was the fashionable tone, for the erotic Matheson,
indeed, even goes so far as to declare that it is the "most beautiful of
tones"--an opinion which is certainly characteristic of the state of
nerves of the world of culture at that day. We have outgrown this
tearful, tender love melody and now consider A-major to be a key
especially appropriate for the love song; and already we find Don Juan
declaring his love to Zerlina in A-major.

Since the days of the Romanticists, since Beethoven, our ear, in the
conception of the keys also, has decidedly turned away from the more
simple and natural toward the more eccentric. In the keys C-, G-, D-,
F-, B-and E-flat major the eighteenth century still found characteristic
peculiarities which we are scarcely able to hear at present; to the
over-irritated modern ear these simple keys sound flat, colorless, and
empty; instead, we have dug our way deeper and deeper among the
out-of-the-way keys, and melodies which our fathers made use of only to
produce the rarest and strongest emotions have already become the daily
bread of our composers.

One can, in the end, escape from this chaos of differing ears only if
one accedes to the opinion of old Quantz, the flute teacher of Frederick
the Great, who, after an exhaustive argument for and against, comes to
the conclusion that in theory nothing can be definitely decided
concerning the characters of the keys; in practice, however, the
composer is sure to feel that everything does not sound equally well in
all keys and therefore must decide each individual case separately, in
conformity with his artistic ear and instinct; I will merely add--also
in conformity with the ear of his time. For Quantz, by declining to make
a theoretical decision, shows that his ear had fallen captive to the
Italian musical school which strove not so much to hear the
characteristic in music as the simply beautiful, and, indifferent to the
prevailing lively controversy over the keys, composed its melodies as
was most convenient for the voice of the singer and the fingers of the
accompanist.

In the first half of the eighteenth century people still possessed a
very keen ear for dance music. The great majority of the dance melodies
of that time are moderately animated. To our modern ear and pulse-beat,
on the contrary, slow dance music seems to be a contradiction in itself;
a melody which in those days inspired people and started their feet to
dancing would now lull us to sleep. We desire stormily exciting dance
music; our ancestors gave the preference to the gayly stimulating kind.
How entirely differently constituted, how differently qualified
historically, politically, and socially, was that generation in whose
ears sounded the dance rhythm of the majestic _sarabande_, the solemnly
animated _entree, loure_, and _chaconne_, the delicate pastoral
_musette_, the staid gliding _siciliano_, and the measured, graceful
minuet, compared to a generation who dance the whirling waltz, the
stormy skipping _galop_, and the furious _cancan!_ In the opera the
tragic hero could dance a _sarabande_, and even in choral songs of the
church the ear of the eighteenth century could distinguish dance music.
Matheson made (1739) out of the choral song "When we are in dire
distress" a very danceable minuet; out of "How beautifully upon us
shines the morning star" a _gavotte_; out of "Lord Jesus Christ, thou
greatest gift" a _sarabande_; out of "Be joyful, my soul" a _burree_;
and finally out of "I call to Thee, Lord Jesus Christ" a _polonaise_, by
preserving the choral melodies note for note and only changing the
rhythm, just exactly in the same way as we now make marches, waltzes,
and polkas out of operatic arias. What colossal contrasts of the musical
ear in the course of a single century! In them is marked not only a
revolution of artistic development, but a much greater revolution of the
entire system of social ethics.

In several musical authors of the first decade of the last century we
find the remark that the fashionable taste in music had at that time
suddenly veered around; a short time before, the greatest effects had
been produced with the fastest possible tempo, the most animated rhythm
and figures; now slow, solemn music was the order of the day. In the
seventeenth century the twelve-eighths time was mainly employed for
dance music and, in general, for quick movements; in the beginning of
the eighteenth century, on the contrary, this species of time conveyed
to people's ears something quite different; it then became the
conventional measure for the soft, yearning _adagio_. Haendel, in his
lively _gigs_ and in his lingering pastoral love arias, gives us side by
side both conceptions of twelve-eighths time. In the second half of the
century this species of time, so much in vogue formerly, disappears
almost entirely. Generally speaking, in the period of Haydn the sense of
rhythm undergoes a simplifying process, and many species of time are
done away with altogether. There is, in this particular, no greater
contrast than Haydn and Sebastian Bach. Haydn generalizes the rhythms in
order to attain the most telling and universally comprehensible effect
possible; Bach individualizes them in order to get the most subtle
result possible. Haydn and his age were satisfied, in the main, with the
four-fourths and two-fourths, three-fourths and six-eighths rhythm; he
simplified all conceivable rhythmic forms in such a manner that it was
possible to express them in one of these four rhythms. Bach employs at
least three times as many species of time and is so hair-splitting in
his selections that it is more often a question of a refinement of
designation, of professional coquetting with the master secrets of
technique, than of any real difference in the matter. Only it must be
said that this, with him, springs from a feeling for the most delicate
shades of rhythm, such as has never existed since. The ear of the whole
Bach age had a much keener appreciation than ours, of the subtleties of
rhythm. At that time, in order to distinguish in the ball-room whether a
_courante_ or a minuet, whether a _gavotte_ or a _bourree_, were being
played, a keenness of rhythmic instinct was necessary, of which in truth
very little has survived in our young dancing people of today, who often
have to bethink themselves whether it is a waltz or a polka which the
music is beating in their ears with the rhythmic flail.

In the first decades of our century an ear for fine rhythmic _nuances_
of dance music scarcely existed any longer, while at the same time, in
concert-music, a greater wealth of rhythm was developing. Never were
people inspired by more rhythmically flat dance tunes than those of the
waltzes, schottisches, etc., which, for example, were danced in the
twenties. The ear for the fine shades of "danceableness" in musical
rhythm had at that time become absolutely dulled and had fallen asleep;
now it is perceptibly awakening once more. Our polkas, mazurkas, etc.,
based on the clearly defined original rhythm of the national
folk-dances, are promising harbingers of this. But is there not an
important hint for the historian of culture in the fact that the sense
for the finer dance rhythms began to die out at the time of the French
revolution and was most completely extinguished in the rough days of the
Napoleonic tempest and the decade immediately following, whereas in the
age of Louis XIV. the ear for the subtleties of dance rhythm appears to
have been most universally and most highly developed? And with the newly
awakening delight in the _rococo_ the modern ear is again becoming
perceptibly keener as regards the _nuances_ of dance rhythms.

We have grown quicker in tempo in exactly the same proportion as we have
become more elevated in pitch. We live twice as quickly as the
eighteenth century, and therefore our music is performed twice as
quickly. Most of our musicians can no longer play even a Haydn minuet
because they no longer have an ear or a pulse for the comfortable
moderate movement of these compositions. The calm, easy-going _andante_,
in which our classical age portrayed many of its clearest and purest
musical pictures, is a tempo absolutely tabooed by modern Romanticists.
_Comodo, comodamente_, i.e., comfortably, was, a hundred years ago, a
very favorite designation for the manner of performing individual
musical compositions. This superscription has quite disappeared from
circulation in our day, and we are much more apt to mount up to the
_furioso_ than to remain quietly behind with the _Comodo_. The old
masters also had a species of composition with the superscription
"_Furia_," but their fury was not to be taken very seriously, for the
_furia_ was a dance. The French in former times considered the very slow
trill to be especially beautiful. This kind of trill sounds to us
amateurishly ridiculous, while, on the contrary, the most admired rapid
trills of our best singers of today would probably have been called
"false shakes" a hundred and fifty years ago. Incidentally it may be
remarked that two hundred years ago people actually took pleasure in
trilling with the third instead of with the second; this, in the
eighteenth century, was only adhered to by bagpipers, while to our ear
it has become an absolute abomination and barbarity.

A hundred years ago it was considered very daring to perform an _adagio_
before the public in a concert hall. Contemporary musical authors utter
emphatic warnings against this experiment. A sustained, seriously
melancholy composition, dying away in quiet passion, was naturally just
as tiresome for the opulent merry company of those days as a fugue
composition is for the majority of our public. People sought to be
pleasantly incited by music, not thrillingly excited; therefore
comfortable slow tempo was demanded, but no _adagio_. If one did attempt
an _adagio_ in a gallant style of composition the player first had to
render it lively and amusing by all sorts of freely added adornments, by
means of passages and cadences, by improvised trills, _gruppettos_,
_pincements_, _battements_, _flattements_, _doubles_, etc. "In the
_adagio_," says Quantz, speaking of the mode of execution, "each note
must be, as it were, caressed." In the execution of our heroic _adagios_
it is rather required that each note shall be maltreated. From the
viewpoint of the historian of culture it is an important fact that the
first half of the eighteenth century had not yet acquired an ear for the
sentimental, feminine _adagio_. The _adagios_ of Bach and Haendel are all
of the masculine gender. And then what a remarkable alteration of the
musical ear took place, when, in the second half of the same century,
the soft-as-butter _adagios_ of the composers of the day all at once
caused every beautiful soul to melt with tender emotion! At the same
time that the Werther-Siegwart period starts in literature, the layman
acquired an ear for the _adagio_. How very slightly as yet has the
intimate concatenation between the development of music and that of
literature been investigated. The entire _Siegwart_ is indeed nothing
but a melting Pleyel _adagio_, translated into windy words. A
priceless passage in _Siegwart_ treats of the _adagio_. Siegwart and his
school friend are playing one evening an _adagio_ of Schwindl on the
violin: "And now they played so meltingly, so whimperingly and so
lamentingly, that their souls became soft as wax. They laid down their
violins, looked at one another with tears in their eyes, said nothing
but 'excellent'--and went to bed." The ear of the sentimental period,
which had so suddenly become sensitive to the _adagio_, has never been
so tersely branded! From that time on there was a regular debauch of
_adagio_ beatitude. In the time of Jean Paul they wrote as a maxim in
autograph albums that a bad man could not play an _adagio_, not to
mention other florid trash of this sort. Nevertheless, the moment when
we acquired an ear for the _adagio_ remains epoch-making in the history
of culture.

It is not strange that, in harmony, much that formed surprising
contrasts for our ancestors should, on the contrary, cause us very
little surprise, or rather should appear trivial to us.
[Illustration: A VILLAGE FUNERAL _From the Painting by Benjamin
Vautier_]

But that combinations of harmony should sound absolutely false and
nonsensical to the ear of one generation, which to the ear of another
age sounded beautiful and natural--this is a puzzling fact. The shrill
and unprepared dissonances which we now often consider very effective
were thought to be ear-splitting a hundred years ago. But let us go
still further. The awful succession of fourths in the diaphonies of
Guido of Arezzo, in the eleventh century, are so incongruous to our ear
that expert singers must exercise the utmost self-control in order even
to give utterance to such combinations of harmony--and yet they must
have sounded beautiful and natural to the medieval ear! Even dogs, which
listen quietly to modern third and sixth passages, begin to howl
lamentably if one plays before them on the violin the barbaric fourth
passages of the Guido diaphonies! This historically verified alternation
of the musical ear is indeed incomprehensible. It may serve, however, to
help us to divine how horribly medieval dogs would have howled if one
had been able to play to them--well, let us say, modulations from
_Tannhaeuser_.

The concert music of the first half of the eighteenth century was _in
its trivial entirety_ a "diversion of the mind and wit." In the same way
that we now write "popular musical text-books," they wrote, in that day,
directions "how a _galant homme_ could attain complete comprehension of
and taste in music," and Matheson says, not satirically, but in earnest:
"Formerly only two things were demanded of a composition, namely, melody
and harmony; but nowadays one would come off badly if one did not add
the third thing, namely, gallantry, which, however, can in no wise be
learned or set down in rules but is acquired only by good taste and
sound judgment. If one wished for an example, and were the reader
perhaps not gallant enough to understand what gallantry means in music,
it might not come amiss to use that of a dress, in which the cloth could
represent the so necessary harmony, the style; the suitable melody, and
then perhaps the embroidery might represent the gallantry."