A	»	B	»	C	»	D	»	E
F	»	G	»	H	»	I	»	J
K	»	L	»	M	»	N	»	O
P	»		R	»	S	»		T
U	»		V	»	W	»		Z

Alice Duer Miller - "The Happiest Time of Their Lives "

Louis P. Benezet - "The World War and What was Behind It"

Lord Dunsany - "Plays of Gods and Men"

Various - "The American Missionary"

Nicholas Brealey Buys Davies-Black
Moreover Technologies - Premier purveyor of real-time news and RSS feeds from across the Web

Gray Gets New Ingram Role; Lovett Heading Ingram Digital
Ad - Get Info for Book Publishing from 14 search engines in 1.

PW Morning Report, January 6, 2009">The PW Morning Report, January 6, 2009
We have been looking for ways to fuel additional growth, said Chuck Dresner, v-p, associate publisher of NB North America, which has offices in Boston, Mass. Davies-Black has built up an excellent publishing program and a recognized brand in some of the

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




With such tailor-like artistic taste prevalent in the gallant world of
that day, it is all the more astonishing that a solitary great spirit
like Sebastian Bach dared to develop his best thoughts and most peculiar
forms also in concert music. To be sure, as a natural consequence he had
to remain solitary.

The above mentioned music "for the diversion of the mind and wit" loved
short pieces, concise composition, minor measures, frequent repetitions
of the same thought. The intellectual ear grasps all that easily, and
amuses itself with the comparison of themes which are repeated in the
same or in changed forms. We, on the contrary, nearly always listen to
music with a dreamy, seldom with an intellectually comparative ear;
therefore modern music is much more influential, but also much more
dangerous, than the old. Musical pieces increase in length from year to
year, in order that, during the performance of them, one may have the
requisite time to dream. The composition has become infinitely more
complicated. Formerly four measures sufficed for a simple melodic
phrase, then six, then eight, now twelve and sixteen are hardly enough.
Worthy old Schicht called young Beethoven a musical pig when he first
learned to know the broad architectonic composition in the latter's
works. He listened to the man of the future with the ear of his own past
age, and in so far was quite right. To the people of the earlier period
of the eighteenth century Beethoven's works would certainly have seemed
unspeakably confused and bombastic, indeed like the products of musical
insanity and, moreover, swarming with the worst kind of stylistic and
grammatical blunders, as they did indeed appear at times even to the
older contemporaries of the master. Little by little, however, it has
grown to be rather risky to assert this fact, for every musical ass now
argues that _because_ his works please nobody, therefore he must be a
Beethoven.

The concise thoughts and phrases of the old masters are disturbing to
our dreamy musical ear--they are disquieting, they wake us up. Modern
musicians are very seldom able to perform impressively this all too
concise style of composition because they are no longer accustomed to
interchange _forte_ and _piano_ and melodic expression in such short
musical sentences; they only have ear and hand for very broad periods,
yard-long _fortes_, _pianos_ and _crescendos_. By far the greater part
of the older chamber-music of the eighteenth century has for our ear
something soberly rationalistic. Such imitative music in that age
compares with modern imitative music as the painted allegories of the
Pigtail age compare with the symbolical paintings of Kaulbach. Johann
Jacob Frohberger, court organist to the Emperor Ferdinand III.,
portrayed the dangers which he incurred crossing the Rhine in
an--_allemande_. To the ear of his contemporaries this portrayal sounded
absolutely plain and intelligible. Dietrich Buxtehude described the
nature of the planets in seven suites for the piano. The Hamburg
organist, Matthias Weckmann, set the sixty-third chapter of Isaiah to
music, and the then celebrated missionary to the Jews, Edzardi, bore him
witness that in the bass he had painted the Messiah as plainly as if he
had seen Him with his own eyes. We have no longer any ear for the
comprehension of such rationalistically allegorized music; indeed, we
can understand the ear which a former age possessed for it just as
little as we can understand the euphony which the ear of the Middle Ages
found in Guido's fourth-harmonies, which now even the dogs cannot put up
with.

I shall break off here with the presentation of my documents concerning
the alteration of the musical ear. If one tried to expatiate instead of
merely suggesting, the sketch would soon grow to be a book.

There is certainly a wonderful charm in conjuring up the spirit of past
ages from yellowed sheets of music, and, with the help of historical
study, in quiet cozy hours, to tune one's own ear anew, so that it may
once more hear in spirit the harmonies which were listened to by
generations long since deceased, just as they sounded to the ear of the
latter. There is a wonderful charm in searching after the most secret
instinctive tones of the emotional life of a bygone world, the natural
sounds of their souls, which are so entirely different from our own and
which would be lost for us--since picture and word stand too far
off--had they not found fixed expression in musical composition. The
character-picture of the last century, as portrayed by the historian of
culture, is lacking in that peculiar soulful lustre, that mysterious
little luminous point which shines upon the beholder from the eye of a
well-painted portrait, if such things as the knowledge of the eye for
natural scenery and the ear for music of the age are not included among
the features of the character-picture.






THE STRUGGLE OF THE ROCOCO WITH THE PIGTAIL[17]

By W.H. RIEHL


Translated by FRANCES H. KING

No time is so rich as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in humorous
original types of a distinct _genre_, who built for themselves a world
apart. Everywhere in this period we meet with eccentrics by profession,
who with deliberate intention play, as the actors say, a "charged"
character-part. Their freaks and gambols were considered worthy to be
handed on to posterity in memoirs and books of anecdote, and whoever
wanted to be a gentleman was obliged, in some particulars at least, to
be a fool. The romantic adventures of the Middle Ages returned again in
a new costume, in less fantastic but far more humorous forms; Don
Quixote exchanged his helmet for a wig.

For the nineteenth century original types of this kind--where they still
happen to exist--are quite adventitious; for the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries they were essential.

That capricious glorying in the most baroque personality possible, that
leaning toward individual caricature, inborn in the whole age, agrees
indeed very well with the arbitrarily fantastic taste of the Rococo
period--of the seventeenth century--but it stands in sharpest contrast
to the tendency of the Pigtail in the eighteenth. For to prune down the
natural growth, to sober down the fantastic, to make the luxurious poor,
emaciated, and uniform, and to weave life, art, and science on the same
loom of academic rule--all this is a characteristic which distinguishes
the Pigtail from the Rococo. This leaning toward individual caricature
nevertheless was maintained throughout the entire age of the Pigtail.
Indeed the very figure in the escutcheon of this period, the pigtail of
hair, grew out of the contradictory effort to restrain and render
uniform the natural luxuriance of the hair, and yet at the same time to
append to men's backs a pure freak, a little, absolutely original
scroll.

One might say, in short, one extreme challenged the other. When people
had banished the old professional clown from the stage, they felt the
necessity of running about themselves as clowns. The sober, enlightened
age protested against the old folk-tales with goblins, gnomes, elves,
and other kindred sprites, but, to make up for it, thousands of living
caricatures played in their own rooms the part of goblins and gnomes,
and lady shepherdesses appropriated the roles of the elves, nixies, and
nymphs.

This phenomenon, however, leads to facts of much deeper significance for
the history of culture. Let us first define the conceptions. The words
"rococo" and "pigtail" at first applied only to the plastic arts; we
are, however, gradually becoming accustomed to employ them to designate
the whole period of culture. That is right and commendable, for those
words have been taken from real life, from experience by the senses,
whereas, as a rule, we almost always fabricate lifeless scholastic terms
for such things.

The Rococo--in the plastic arts--presupposes the Renaissance, and I
believe it has even been called the Renaissance gone crazy. One might
say more justly that when the Renaissance got intoxicated it became the
Rococo. And if the Rococo is the drunken debauch of the Renaissance then
the Pigtail would be the seediness which follows after it.

But I must rein in my steed to a quieter pace and give a more scholastic
definition.

In the Renaissance, antique forms were born again, at first within and
beside the medieval, finally replacing them entirely. But the new age of
the sixteenth century had new needs, new senses, new passions, which
the antique could satisfy no more fully than could the Gothic. When a
person is no longer an old Roman he cannot quite build and fashion like
the old Romans. For this reason the antique was pulled and stretched and
fitted on the new man as well as could be managed. It is, however, just
as hard to adapt forms of art as to alter coats which have been cut out
for some one else's body. Only a few of the greatest architects and
sculptors succeeded for a little while in reconciling the inner
contradiction between the new life and the old art. No period of art had
so short a flourishing period as the genuine Renaissance; when it came
into the world it bore the birthmark of mannerism on its forehead.

This mannerism in its fulness and maturity is the Rococo. The burly men
and women bubbling over with life, in whom the stormy spirit of the age
of discovery and invention, of social revolution and religious
reformation, had not yet spent itself, finding the forms of the antique
too confined and yet not wishing to give them up, pulled and stretched
them, added to them scrolls and crossettes, nay, even shattered them to
fragments and then held fast to their ruins, indeed even went so far as
to find these caricatures and ruins more beautiful than the original.
The Rococo is violent in chains, insolent in constraint, drunken in
sobriety. It is the art of a rich, voluptuous, mystic, restless age.

Then came war and desolation, poverty and misery. Decadent men become
dry and pedantic. Oppression and tyranny without engender pedagogism
within. Thus the art of the Rococo became in the eighteenth century
poor, sober, squeezed into rules, deprived of every passionate impulse
which formerly might have reconciled us to its efflorescence. Mannerists
of genius can glitter alluringly, pedantic ones are deterringly boring.
The Pigtail is the dried-up Rococo, trimmed according to academic rules.
The luxurious Rococo flora, composed of all kinds of plants, poisonous
herbs, and weeds is presented to us, in the age of the Pigtail, as a
dead herbarium on blotting-paper.

The periods of the history of art are measured only in round numbers.
Thus the plastic artist may well say that the Renaissance belongs to the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Baroque to the seventeenth, and
the Rococo and the Pigtail to the eighteenth. But for the historian of
culture, on the other hand, this calculation is a little too round.
German literature during a good part of the Rococo period already
belongs to the Pigtail, and it frees itself from the Pigtail in the very
densest Pigtail period of the architect and the sculptor. Palestrina and
Orlando di Lasso represent the aftermath of the Middle Ages in the
period of the Renaissance; Haendel and Bach, in the eighteenth century,
would have stood much closer to the Rococo than to the Pigtail, if they
had not been such original and peculiar geniuses that one cannot quite
classify them under these heads at all.

And yet the Rococo strikes a key-note which resounds through the whole
history of culture of the seventeenth century, just as the Pigtail does
through that of the eighteenth. On that account one need not give up the
general character of the period, and yet one can see how the Rococo
still presses forward in the Pigtail age. For in the battle of spirits
the columns do not advance with even step and even front like the
battalions on the parade ground, but here the file-leaders are often a
century in advance of the centre.

When, therefore, the history of art and morals of the previous century
shows us how at that time discordant spirits nevertheless wrestled with
one another on common ground, the excess of fantastic arbitrariness with
the most sober, universal pedantry, I call it simply a struggle of the
Rococo with the Pigtail.

Men despised real history and broke with it, to be subjected all the
more to the tyranny of historical ghosts. While the poets were fettered
in blind worship of the unities of Aristotle as of a fundamental
historical law, Houdart, without understanding a word of Greek,
corrected Homer, whose poetry did not seem to conform sufficiently to
rule.

In the characters of the great sovereigns of the eighteenth century,
who created new, stricter, more regular forms of government, the same
contrast appears between personal arbitrariness and devotion to this
universal law founded by them. Frederick the Great, Joseph II.,
Catherine of Russia, Maria Theresa, Charles XII., Peter the Great, could
none of them quite escape from the eccentricity which was considered the
necessary attribute of genius. They furnished material, therefore, for
countless anecdotes; by personal whims, freaks, and caprices they freed
themselves at times from the new spirit of social uniformity and
political legal equality. One could not reconcile such anecdote-business
with the picture of the antique and medieval hero-kings. In the last two
centuries, on the contrary, a king had to be witty if his greatness was
not to be considered tedious by the people of the Pigtail. The
scandalous chronicle of the Courts was at least as important as the
political chronicles of the kingdoms. Through his mother-wit and his
good jokes Old Fritz became a popular figure even among his adversaries,
and among the people outside of Prussia he still lives on today in the
anecdotes of his private life rather than in his princely actions. All
the kings and heroes of the Rococo age therefore are rather material for
the historical _genre_ picture of the novel and the comedy, than for the
genuine historical picture of the epic and the tragedy. One can fully
characterize them only by painting a hundred individual traits
expressive of their peculiarity and their caprice, and this is
incompatible with the great epic style. It is by no means accidental
that Scherenberg is unable to get away from the most arbitrary crabbed
versification in his historical _genre_ poems celebrating Frederick the
Great. The capricious heroes with pigtails do not tolerate smooth
verses. The favorite verse-form of their day, however, the stiff
alexandrine, characterizes the Pigtail exclusively, not the Rococo.

The small princes imitated the great, and what in the latter had been
original traits of character, became in the former amusing caricatures.
The one copies Peter the Great's wedding of dwarfs; the other the giant
guard of Frederick Wilhelm I. A prince with such a wonderful passion for
the bass viol as Duke Maurice of Saxe-Merseburg, who even laid a small
bass viol in the cradle of his new-born daughter, was possible only in
the eighteenth century. It may be that his subjects did not even call
him a fool, but only a man of princely whims. A prince who wields the
fiddle-bow instead of the sceptre and thereby keeps his hands "clean
from blood and ink atrocities," is a true representative of the Rococo,
not of the Pigtail. That Landgrave of Hesse who wished to create a
second Potsdam in Pirmasens, and was made blissful by the thought that
he could hold his court in the tobacco-reeking guard-room, who
celebrated the greatest triumph of his reign when he had his entire
grenadier regiment manoeuvre in the pitch-dark drill-hall without the
least disorder occurring in the ranks, he is a real Rococo figure, for
by his mad fancies he humorously destroyed the long pigtail appended to
his actions.

A prince in those days had to be a virtuoso of personality. At the same
time the etiquette of the Courts, which amounted to the most rigid
conformity to rules, formed a strange contradiction to the ambition of
the individual prince to shine as an original. It is this same
contradiction which also characterizes the art and science of that time,
the contradiction between academic conformity to rules and the most
arbitrary scroll work, the contradiction between the Pigtail and the
Rococo. An old hack-blade of a German prince of the Empire, finding at a
state dinner that a foreign prince had loaded too much meat upon his
plate, without more ado took away half of it, and this incident
admirably denotes the struggle of the age between arbitrariness and
etiquette. In order to revenge the slight offense committed against
etiquette by the prince, and guest, the host is guilty of a far greater
one, and his act was without doubt admired as a real stroke of genius.

In the highest circles of society people often believed they could not
amuse themselves better than by voluntarily submitting to the most
severe despotism of an external constraint, in order to allow the utmost
latitude to personal whims. Herein lies the colossal humor, the deep
self-mockery of the age. One of the most remarkable monuments of this
self-mockery was founded by a Margrave of Baireuth in the Hermitage near
Baireuth. In order to enjoy the pleasures of a sojourn in the country
the whole Court had to play at being monks and nuns. By silence and
solitude, by painfully shackling themselves with all sorts of wearisome
rules imitated from religious orders, the "hermits" had to prepare for
social pleasures and Court festivities. In order to enjoy Court life in
a new way people disguised it under the serious mask of the cloister;
people tortured and bored themselves in order to be merry, and buckled
social intercourse into a straitjacket, in order to give it the
appearance of an entirely new and free movement.

Even German Pietism, which in the beginning of the eighteenth century
gained so many adherents in the world of fashion, showed a piece of
Rococo in the Pigtail. It, too, was founded, in part, on a mixture of
the most subjective freedom and arbitrariness with the most rigid
constraint of a new religious order; therefore it often appeared
revolutionary, reformatory, and reactionary, all at the same time. They
burst the fetters of benumbed dogmatism and petrified church government
in order to inclose every free breath in new fetters. Even the last,
most involuntary act of life--dying--had to be performed systematically.
Pietistic literature of this time produced a work in four volumes which,
with the most minute detail, submits the last hours of fifty-one lately
departed persons to a sort of comparative anatomy, so that people could
learn from it, scholastically as it were, the best way to die. The
author of this work, a Count von Henkel, congratulates a friend, who had
been a witness of the "instructive death" of a certain Herr von Geusau,
in these words: "It was worth while to have heard a _Collegium
privatissimum_ on the art of dying like a Christian, especially from
such a _professore moribundo_."

The French Neo-Romanticists, who declare war in the most decided manner
against all literary traditions of the eighteenth century, nevertheless
absolutely revel in material furnished by that time; the gentlemen in
wigs have become their most profitable heroes, and in real life, as well
as in our novels, we can find no more modern way to decorate our parlors
and our furniture than by covering them with the scroll work of the
wig-age. This is only an apparent contradiction. It is not the Pigtail
but the Rococo that we are reviving so industriously, not the academic
constraint of rules, but the subjective arbitrariness, the spirit of the
original, freakish types. This untrammeled caprice of the Rococo age
seems to us as fresh as nature compared with the well planned symmetry
of our modern conditions, which no longer permit one to be a real fool,
and therefore do not allow any dazzling figures of romance to come to
the surface, just as the eighteenth century, on its part, no longer
engendered any real dramatic characters. If Rousseau, as soon as the
spirit of coarseness came over him, hurls the most spirited abuse at
everybody, if the peasant poet, Robert Burns, "a giant original man," as
Thomas Carlyle calls him, suddenly appearing among the puppets and
buffoons of the eighteenth century, is gaped at like a curiosity in the
salons of Edinburgh on account of his rough simple nature, then we too
can find delight in the natural strength which is hidden in the Pigtail
under the form of the Rococo. Even the historian of art, who grows
indignant over the extinction of the historic sense in that age, over
the vandalism with which an arrogant lack of understanding destroyed the
monuments of the Middle Ages--even he must, at the same time, admire the
self consciousness which speaks in this vandalism, the defiant belief in
the wisdom of their own age, which boldly remolded everything to suit
their own taste because they were finally persuaded that this taste was
the only true one. It is a peculiar sign of conscious strength and of
vitality breaking out in the midst of the sickly life of a degenerate
age. We can almost envy the old pigtails for this blind belief in
themselves, which grows out of the boastful arbitrariness of the Rococo,
in the midst of and in spite of the constraint of the Pigtail, and is
closely connected with the mad cult of originality practised by so many
individual types. We have strong doubts concerning the excellence of our
advanced mental development, while in the days of our great-grandfathers
nobody doubted that that age, which we properly stigmatize with the
sobriquet of the Pigtail Age, was really the golden age of art and
science.

Our South-German peasants still live completely in the Rococo as regards
artistic taste. They have forgotten the Middle Ages and have not yet
found modern art. To the peasant of the Black Forest, the splendid,
baroque, dome-shaped church of St. Blasien is a much greater marvel of
native art than the Freiburg cathedral. Gaudy, exaggeratedly fantastic
Rococo saints are generally considered by Catholic country people very
much more edifying than a picture in the severe style of the Middle Ages
or of the modern school. In the ornamentation of utensils and houses of
our peasants the Rococo style has quite naively been carried along into
our own times, and whoever nowadays wishes to have genuine Rococo chairs
in his parlor not infrequently searches through the peasants' houses.
The pleasure which the peasant takes in the Rococo, which has bravely
survived so many changes in taste, is easily explained. The peasant
himself is an original, rather, 'tis true, as a species than
individually, and the brilliant, fantastic, affected, violent quality of
the Rococo appealed to his rough, sturdy child's nature, just like large
capital letters. On the other hand he never sympathized with the genuine
Pigtail. The scant, niggardly dress-coat of this period was never
adopted as the prevailing costume of the people, any more than the
fashion of wearing the hair in a real pigtail, and the bare facades of
the academic Pigtail architecture never became epoch-making in popular,
architecture. The peasant only appropriated to himself the Rococo out
of the Pigtail of the last century.

We pedantic city people, on the contrary, in the outer construction of
our houses, in their joiner-like, barrack architecture with the
monotonous rows of windows, have all this time remained prisoners of the
Pigtail; but in the gaudy, whimsical decoration of our rooms, on the
other hand, we have reached the Rococo once more, and only very recently
have we begun to improve by going back to the powerful individualism of
the Renaissance--as, for instance, in many of the new streets in Munich.
There is, however, nothing adventitious about this, for, in general, a
more personal, original life is flourishing in our _bourgeoisie_ than
there was twenty years ago.

In the Rococo period there was an endless amount of portrait painting,
and this partiality to having one's picture done in oils, pastel,
engraving, in silhouette and in miniature medallion, maintained itself
throughout the entire Pigtail period. It was conformable to the spirit
of the times and to one's rank to look upon one's own features as
something not to be despised, and not a soul suspected that there was
any personal vanity in it.

In the same way that people had their portraits executed by the
engraver, they also liked to depict their own likeness in their letters,
diaries, and memoirs. The custom came to us from the French in the
seventeenth century, and, as a real child of the Rococo, triumphantly
survived the struggle with the Pigtail, and lasted on into the
nineteenth century. No man nowadays can carry on such extensive friendly
correspondence as was universally carried on from fifty to a hundred
years ago. This self-inspection, this importance attached to little
personalities, disgusts us. The letters of Gleim, Heinse, Jacobi,
Johannes Mueller suffice to make us feel fully conscious of this disgust.
We should now call the man a coxcomb who considered his precious ego so
important that he had to carry on, year in and year out, a yard-long
correspondence about himself. General interests have grown, private
interests have shriveled up, but thereby, indeed, the original types of
the old days have become impossible.