Part 3

It has often been said that in the eighteenth century the musician had no other function than to accompany the clatter of dishes at princely dinner-tables. Even if this were strictly true one might at least reply that in this respect the aristocracy of the eighteenth century did more for the art of music than their descendants. The music of that period may have been conventional, courtly and designed to give pleasure; but if so, its freedom from emptiness, vulgarity and triviality is astonishing. Church and State may have deliberately encouraged the “light-hearted gaiety of the Viennese” in order to distract their thoughts from the more serious problems of politics; but music in those days was at any rate still an art, not a mere commercial product. At the same time the printing presses were active. A symphony might have been composed for the entertainment of a prince, but as soon as it was printed it became accessible to audiences outside the aristocratic circle. It was an age of “sensibility”; fine feelings, sighs and tears were all the fashion. Music begins――we can see it in Couperin, in Boccherini, in Mozart too――to display the quality of refinement, a quality which in a later generation was to have a disastrous effect on the vitality of the art.

IX

The outstanding characteristic of the nineteenth century is its moral fervour. The religious preoccupation of Victorian England is only a small part of this age of aspiration. In most countries of Europe philosophy, science, literature, art, and social life bear witness to the ethical passion, even in the cases of the most indignant revolt against it. It dominates music from the time of Beethoven onwards; and even now it is not entirely extinct in the musical world. The spirit of the French Revolution transformed the musician from a lackey to a prophet. Mozart was cut off just as he had recorded his vision of the new age in _The Magic Flute_. Beethoven proclaims it in the _Choral Fantasia_ and illuminates it still more intensely in _Fidelio_, in the _Choral Symphony_, the _Missa Solemnis_ and the last quartets. One cannot class Beethoven with the Romantics any more than Kant or Goethe. Romanticism stood not for enlightenment but for the reaction against it. The Romantics were like men who after an earthquake return to the ruins of their city to see what they can recover from them. It was not always their own property that they recovered. The aristocrats had lost their material privilege, but they were still determined to remain a class apart. The Catholic revival, on the Continent even more than in England, was the assertion of aristocracy as a moral principle. It affected music apart from the music that was definitely liturgical because it brought about a revival of interest in Palestrina comparable to the revival of interest in Dante. The emancipation of the artist from feudal servitude encouraged him to assume something of the privilege of the aristocracy. The typical figure of this movement is Paganini, from whom are descended Liszt and a multitude of minor musicians who made it their life-work to play the prophet in public. The mechanical developments of the new century contributed to the development of the new outlook on music. As travelling became easier and music-printing cheaper concerts increased in number and increasing newspapers gave them increasing publicity. “_Seid umschlungen, Millionen!_” sang Beethoven, and the millions were embraced, though perhaps not quite in the way in which Schiller and he had intended.

The modern musician is often tempted to see nothing in the art of the past century but pretentiousness. It is not altogether just to accuse the century of megalomania. Isolated musicians, such as Liszt, Berlioz and Wagner, were certainly possessed with the idea of their own greatness. One might say the same of Beethoven himself; but in Beethoven’s case the consciousness of his own greatness was inseparable from a deep feeling of humility and an overwhelming sense of duty. Beethoven was no respecter of persons, but he had the philosopher’s intuition of his relation to humanity and of humanity’s relation to the universe. Undoubtedly many artists of the nineteenth century were stimulated by his example to attempt works on a needlessly colossal scale, especially in Germany, where metaphysical studies have always influenced a circle that extended far beyond the professed philosophers. An ethical view of music became more and more strongly marked in Germany; during the latter half of the century it made itself felt in England, and to a slighter extent even in France. By the end of the century there was a very definite tendency to regard music as a form of free religious worship, expressing and stimulating mystical experience for temperaments which could no longer be satisfied by dogmatic theology.

X

It is at all times difficult to draw a line between religious exaltation and rhetorical pretentiousness. A consideration of the technical means of expression in music may help us to clear our minds. Since the middle of the fifteenth century music has exhibited a perpetual struggle between counterpoint and harmony, between what are sometimes called the horizontal and vertical tendencies of the art. The horizontal conception of music is, as all musicians know, the primary musical instinct to sing and to elaborate the art by the combination of voices each singing its own independently expressive line and achieving further emotional force by the ordered clash of dissonance. The vertical conception cannot really be separated entirely from the horizontal, for it has grown out of it. It derives its emotional force from the assumption of periodic stresses, and the study of harmony is therefore inseparable from that of rhythm. It is regular rhythm which gives different kinds of chords their æsthetic and the quasi-logical values.

Melody represents individuality and counterpoint the interaction and conflict of individualities. Harmony represents the community as a whole under the direction of the mind which has created the music. It is therefore natural that as music comes to be associated with communal feeling on a large scale, with such ideas, for instance, as the universal brotherhood of man, it should tend to become more and more predominantly vertical in method. The ordinary music-lover can realize this from his recollections of Bach and Handel. Bach’s music is mainly horizontal in tendency. It is music for small groups of performers, seldom suited to interpretation by large bodies. Handel’s music, in which the vertical method is far more conspicuous, gains rather than loses by the multiplication of voices and instruments, and for this reason Handel is to most Englishmen the ideal composer for occasions of national ceremony. The emotional effect is intensified by the actual increase of sound and along with this by the rhythmical unanimity of the chorus or orchestra. The ordinary man seems to be curiously susceptible to emotion at the sight of several hundred people doing exactly the same thing at one moment, as in military and gymnastic displays, even though the movements executed may be not in the least interesting in themselves.

The communal feeling which is at the back of most of the music of the nineteenth century finds its technical expression in blocks of chords and in strongly accentuated rhythms. A typical example is the theme which opens the _finale_ of Beethoven’s C minor symphony. _Lohengrin_ and _Elijah_ are full of instances. In some cases the impression may be no more than momentary, a mere two or three chords, but the trick makes its effect. It becomes too obviously a trick in the hands of Liszt. As a pianist he could not help being attracted by it. The mechanism of the pianoforte suits full chords better than the complication of counterpoint, and the percussive action of itself exaggerates rhythmical stresses. It was the ideal instrument for Liszt’s grand heroic manner.

The pianoforte was the amateur’s instrument as well as the _virtuoso’s_. The nineteenth century is the age of the amateur pianist. Music became the pleasure of the rising middle class, for whose domestic consumption an endless flood of polite and agreeable music was printed after the examples set by Mendelssohn and Schumann. Whatever the present age may think of those two composers it can safely be said that no musicians have ever been regarded by the general musical public with so widespread and so heartfelt an affection. Whoever easily recalls the lines

As for some dear familiar strain Untir’d we ask, and ask again. Ever, in its melodious store, Finding a spell unheard before――

must surely connect them in immediate memory with the _Scenes of Childhood_ or the _Songs without Words_.

It used often to be said of Mendelssohn that “he had nothing to say, but said it like a gentleman.” To that I may add the observation of one of my own teachers: “When Mendelssohn couldn’t think of anything else to say, he said his prayers.” Is it surprising that the England of Thackeray adored him? To Mendelssohn and Schumann we owe the fashion of what used to be called “characteristic pieces”――quasi-pictorial exploitations of certain idioms which at once established themselves as universally recognizable conventions both of technique and of sentiment――all those “hunting songs,” “spinning songs,” barcarolles, cradle songs, wedding marches and funeral marches. At this distance of time they may have the charm of old-world refinement. But considered historically, what they brought into music was a multitude of insincere _clichés_. Mendelssohn and Schumann are themselves remembered for their very genuine merits. The style which they represented was absorbed into the work of followers whom it is equally impossible to forget as well as into that of the innumerable hundreds of purely commercial composers. Romantic _cliché_ reached its apotheosis in the symphonic monstrosities of Gustav Mahler. But between Mendelssohn and Mahler there came others――worthy in some ways of our deepest and sincerest respect――who from their own high seriousness became victims of the impressive platitude. Ethical fervour led them only too fatally into reverent pomposity.

All this false sentiment was diffused universally by the pianoforte; not merely by the enormous multiplication of instruments and of performers thereon, but by the intrinsic acoustical character of the instrument itself. For the sound of the pianoforte cannot press onwards like that of the voice, the wind instrument or the violin. That is why “horizontal” music is in reality impossible to it; the most it can do is to recall the memory of something heard before. It can do this with extraordinary subtlety. The sudden impact of the hammer on the string gives it even in its most delicate moments a far clearer articulation than the voice or the singing instruments. Its whole art is an art of evasion, illusion and association. It was the ideal instrument for the romantic temperament. It suggested melody, it intensified harmony; it falsified the values of both.

The pianoforte naturally attracted intelligent musicians of all grades because it seemed to place the whole of music within the grasp of two hands. Singing came to be regarded as something almost vulgar, the more so since nature has not always distributed voices and brains in equal proportions. As the ethical view of music deepened, musicians of serious intention turned more to the stringed instruments than to the human voice. The instruments could do so much more, they could run about faster, they had in practice a cleaner accuracy of intonation and a more extended compass. It was easy to forget that after all they were nothing more than instruments, and indeed the very fact that they were instruments seemed to give them a magical character that appealed mysteriously to the romantic mind.

XI

Professor Weissmann has well pointed out that in the romantic days the orchestra dominated music because it was made to represent the unseen supernatural forces against which mere humanity struggled in vain. And the orchestra appealed to many sides of human temperament. It was the appropriate instrument of an age of machinery, and mechanical invention rapidly increased its powers. It appealed to the megalomania of certain types of genius, as well as to the philosophical worshipper of the infinite. It appealed to the plain man by its discipline, by its presentation of a number of nameless individuals doing the same thing at the same moment, and in later days――now, perhaps, more than ever before――by the sight of this huge force controlled and directed by the apparent inspiration of the _virtuoso_ conductor.

The great singers, the few who have reached the highest summits of fame, have always wielded an incomparable power over their hearers. But that very element of personality which gives the supreme singer his greatness distracts the listener on any level but the highest. Personality is a capricious thing, and in singing, more than in any other form of music, the listener’s judgment is liable to be distorted by temperamental considerations which have nothing to do with art. In the case of the instrumentalist they can be more easily set aside. Personality is what human nature values more than anything else in the artist. We see it at its plainest when a singer faces an unsophisticated public; when the public is less simple-minded and inexperienced, when the music put before it is less direct and immediate in its expression, the judgment of personality may be misleading, and may easily mislead artistic judgment. A vigorous personality may delude the public into accepting bad music as good; certain types of music, on the other hand, may falsify the judgment of personality. These statements represent merely the obvious extremes; what must be remembered is that this interaction may vary subtly from moment to moment even during the course of one piece of music.

The multiform appeal of orchestral music bewilders even those who deliberately listen to it in an analytical frame of mind. The difficulty is complicated by the luxuriant growth, during the last hundred years, of what is called “programme-music”――music that sets out to describe or illustrate some idea that can be expressed, and often better expressed, in a literary or pictorial form. To dissect out and trace the history of all the means of emotional stimulus in such modern orchestral music as has become generally popular――such names as Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Richard Strauss, Elgar and Scriabin will give a sufficient idea of the category――would require a whole volume of highly technical analysis. Fortunately there are many music-lovers who have heard enough music to grasp intuitively, if vaguely, certain principles, conventions and technical methods which they are unable to describe in words. They will recognize how “picturesqueness” is achieved by the exploitation of conventional idioms: how these idioms evoke associations not merely with things outside music, but far more widely with the recollection of music of past generations as familiar to them as it was to the composer who exploits it. They will recognize conventions of sound without sense――strings of notes that perhaps once had musical value but have now become mere formulæ, rushing winds and roaring waves “full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing.” They would have learned also, one hopes, to mistrust the composers who delude their audiences, perhaps delude themselves too, with a shimmering veil of indeterminate harmonies, and to mistrust no less those who with an aggressive air of sincerity and directness assume the solemn pose of mystery and chivalry.

XII

Those who live on the outskirts of the world of music may say that they cannot get as much of it as they desire; those who are in the midst of it are painfully aware that they cannot escape the overwhelming flood. The commercialization of music has led to overproduction. This is apparent enough in England, where commercialization has fostered the spawning of a thoroughly degraded type; in Germany the over-production has been a greater danger because the vast complexity of the musical industry has encouraged respectable mediocrity. It is not to be wondered that plenty of musicians would be glad to make a clean sweep of all the music of the past and start fresh from the beginning. We cannot; it is a hopeless delusion. Even if we could make the clean sweep, we are still men of the twentieth century; we cannot return, for just one aspect of our lives and that perhaps the most direct and immediate, to primitive savagery. Civilization has forced us to remember what we ought in the nature of things to have forgotten. Commercialism has always been only too glad to throw dust in our eyes with the pretence of culture. We tell people that they ought to know and love their musical classics. Being out of copyright, they can be reprinted cheaply. Teachers find it least troublesome to teach what they have always taught; concert-givers play what they have always played――it is the safest thing and requires the least rehearsal and study. The casual listener loves the “dear familiar strain.” It is not as if people knew their classics intimately in a scholarly way. And the scholar is easily tempted into false judgments under the itch for research. Old music has its interest for the musical anatomist, but from an artistic point of view most of it is much better forgotten.

There are some who sadly deplore the popularization of the classics on the ground that they risk being desecrated. Why not? If some unlettered person goes into a cinema, hears a fragment of the _Unfinished Symphony_ for the first time and receives a new thrill, surely it is all to the good, at any rate for him. If others feel that the vulgar associations of the cinema have destroyed the music’s beauty for them, let them have done with it, throw it away as a worn-out thing and turn to something else. We may reasonably say that people who are the prey of their unwilling associations, unable to view a work of art with detachment, do not deserve to experience artistic enjoyment; but at the same time we should do well to admit frankly that music which cannot survive momentary degradation (and all things connected with music are and must be merely momentary) is not worth preserving and reproducing. When we consider the innermost nature of music it is surprising that any of it should survive for more than a generation. Some has survived for less, some for far more; but that is no reason why it should survive for ever. Occasionally some work of a remoter age is exhumed and seems to have a new significance for us after having been forgotten for centuries. But its significance is what our own age puts into it. That is one of the advantages of dealing in the art of the past; we can do what we like with it. The art of the present, if it has any vitality, compels us to submit our minds to itself.

The present age revolts from the music of the past century because of its insincerity and pretentiousness. Musicians of the older generation will repudiate this charge with indignation. The criticism is indeed a very summary one, and the man of to-day, if pressed with cross-questioning, may probably be induced to admit a good many single exceptions to his universal condemnation. But technical analysis will show that there is a sounder basis for modern criticism than mere caprice of youthful iconoclasm. The wealth of harmonic resource which the nineteenth century built up was derived, as has been shown, to a large extent from associations, some extra-musical, some intra-musical, some derived from literary or pictorial ideas, some depending on recollections of previous music. These two categories interact on each other again and again, so that it is not easy to separate them out clearly. Like a system of monetary wealth, the wealth of western music has become largely a paper currency and with the realization of this fact values have in many cases become suddenly depreciated. It may be urged that music as an art has derived enormous benefit from the tendency to widen the scope of its significance, from its closer alliance with other intellectual activities and from the deepening conviction of its ethical influence. Is it not childish, it may be asked, for us deliberately to throw away all that we have gained and revert to a condition of music in which it shall be at best a mere entertainment or possibly no more than a physiological stimulus of dangerous passions?

The lofty idealism of Beethoven and certain of those who came after him, both composers and interpreters, is a thing which we cannot possibly deny or ignore; but we may justly question whether the artistic expression of it is still convincing to modern ears. That noble and visionary idealism, in its ardent insistence on the spiritual, tended more and more to suggest that the reality of music lay not so much in the actual sounds perceived by the physical ear as in the relations between them, in sounds――or rather in relations between sounds――never actually heard at all, but induced in the perceptive faculty by association. The works of Beethoven’s third period often seem to lead us into a metaphysical labyrinth. But philosophical language is apt to degenerate into a jargon, and philosophical music, when it is the product of lesser minds than Beethoven’s, into platitudinous rigmarole.

“Fiddle, we know, is diddle: and diddle, we take it, is dee.”

Swinburne’s parody has its musical application too. The classical key-system of Rameau and Bach established a tradition that was academic in the most honourable sense of the word. It won too much respect. It had the symmetrical logic of the heroic couplet in poetry. We can see how in literature the austere reverence for the great academic tradition inevitably petrifies poetry into what discreet reviewers call “scholarly verse.” Music followed an analogous course. By the irony of fate the music of the last century, when it was designed to edify, has become vapid and tedious; what has survived, quaintly artificial though its freshness may be, is the music that was made only for ephemeral entertainment. _La Belle Hélène_ has outlived _Les Béatitudes_.

XIII

It is quite untrue to say that the music of to-day is predominantly frivolous. The modern composer might well reply that even for those who cling to the ideals of the past there are plenty of old-world frivolities that have triumphed over their contemporary solemnities. The devotees of Haydn, Mozart and Cimarosa easily forget that all these three wrote music of deeply serious character and that it was chiefly their serious music which won the respect of their own audiences. There is not even anything new in the modern composer’s occasional habit of making a fool of his critics. But the jokes of the old composers, like those of Aristophanes, often require the elucidation of learned commentators, whereas in our own day the newspapers provide the needful commentary, sometimes before the musician makes his joke. The “verbal hæmorrhage”――as it has been appropriately called――of musical journalism is responsible for most of the deliberate silliness recently perpetrated by composers, who in these days are fully alive to the value of publicity. Music of this type is as ephemeral as the criticism which it is designed to provoke. At the same time it is perfectly reasonable that modern composers should occupy themselves in an artistic spirit with modern dance-forms. They may well take their place in musical history just as the waltz, the minuet, the pavan and the galliard have done.