[Decoration]
_Introduction._
The following biographical sketches were originally published in
America by Mr. George T. Ferris, in two volumes, separately entitled
_The Great German Composers_ and _The Great Italian and French
Composers_. They have achieved the success they deserved: for while we
have whole libraries of books upon the history and technicalities of
music in general, upon musical theories and schools, and upon the
exponents thereof in their artistic capacity, there has been a
distinct dearth of treatises dealing in a brief and popular fashion
with the lives of eminent composers themselves. Now, when music is
"mastered and murdered" in almost every house throughout the length
and breadth of the land, there can be no doubt that compilations of
this kind must be welcome to a very large number--we will not say of
musical students, but of lovers of music. There are, it would be
needless to attempt to prove, great numbers of the music-loving
public, who practically have no facilities towards making acquaintance
with the leading facts in the lives of those men whose compositions
they have such a genuine delight in rendering: to these mainly is such
a book as _Great Composers_ addressed. But, indeed, to every one
interested in music and musicians the volume can hardly fail to be of
interest. In his preface to _The Great Italian and French Composers_,
Mr. Ferris explained that--as was very manifest--"the task of
compressing into one small volume suitable sketches of the more famous
Italian and French composers was, in view of the extent of field and
the wealth of material, a somewhat embarrassing one, especially as the
purpose was to make the sketches of interest to the general
music-loving public, and not merely to the critic and scholar. The
plan pursued has been to devote the bulk of space to composers of the
higher rank, and to pass over those less known with such brief mention
as sufficed to outline their lives, and fix their place in the history
of music."
To _The Great German Composers_ he prefaces a few words which may be
quoted--"The sketches of composers contained in this volume may seem
arbitrary in the space allotted to them. The special attention given
to certain names has been prompted as much by their association with
great art epochs, as by the consideration of their absolute rank as
composers. The introduction of Chopin, born a Pole, and for a large
part of his life a resident of France, among German composers, may
require an explanatory word. Chopin's whole early training was in the
German school, and he may be looked on as one of the founders of the
latest school of pianoforte composition, whose highest development is
in contemporary Germany. He represents German music by his affinities
and his influences in art, and bears too close a relation to important
changes in musical forms to be omitted from this series."
Various important events have occurred since the publication of these
volumes in America: _inter alia_, the performance of Wagner's last
great work "Parsifal," and the death of the great German musician;
the production of new works by Gounod and Verdi; and so forth. The
editor has endeavoured, as briefly as practicable, to supplement Mr.
Ferris's _causeries_ with the addenda necessary to bring _Great
Composers_ down to date. Mr. Ferris further acknowledges his
obligation to the following authorities for the facts embodied in
these sketches:--Hullah's _History of Modern Music_; Fétis'
_Biographie Universelle des Musiciens_; Clementi's _Biographie des
Musiciens_; Hogarth's _History of the Opera_; Sutherland Edwards'
_History of the Opera_; Schlüter's _History of Music_; Chorley's
_Thirty Years' Musical Reminiscences_; Stendhall's _Vie de Rossini_;
Bellasy's _Memorials of Cherubini_; Grove's _Musical Dictionary_;
Crowestl's _Musical Anecdotes_; Schoelcher's _Life of Handel_;
Liszt's _Life of Chopin_; Elsie Polko's _Reminiscences_; Lampadius'
_Life of Mendelssohn_; Urbino's _Musical Composers_; Franz Hueffer's
_Wagner and the Music of the Future_; Haweis' _Music and Morals_;
and the various articles in the leading cyclopædias.
To this volume the present editor has appended a chronological table
of the musicians referred to in the following sketches.
In reading the lives of these great musical composers, we can trace
the gradual development of music from its earliest days as an art and
as a science. Unlike the other arts which have flourished, decayed,
and had rebirth, music, as we now understand it, sprang into being out
of the ferment of the Renaissance, and therefore is the youngest of
the arts--a modern growth belonging particularly to the later phases
of civilisation. Music in a rude, undeveloped condition has existed
doubtless "since the world began." In all nations, and in the records
of past civilisations, indications of music are to be found; martial
strains for the encouragement of warriors on the march; sacred hymns
and sacrificial chants in religious ceremonials; and song accompanied
by some rude instrument--we find to have been known and practised
among remote tribes as well as among potent races. The bards of divers
peoples and many countries in ancient days played upon the harp not
merely for delight, but for the exorcism of evil spirits, the
dispersion of melancholy, the soothing and cure of mental and physical
disorders. Here we find music as the direct expression of feeling, but
not as a science. The Greeks made further use of music by
incorporating it into their dramas, but it was chiefly declamatory,
and was used solely in the choruses. To modern ears such music would
sound very inefficient, more especially as the antique instruments
were of the crudest--and although musical sounds, to a limited extent,
could be produced from them, all attempts at _expression_ must have
been unsuccessful.
In Europe in the early middle ages there existed two kinds of music:
that of the people, spontaneous, impulsive, the song of the
Troubadour, unwritten and orally transmitted from father to son; that
of the Church, which had been greatly encouraged since the days of
Constantine, and especially owed much to St. Ambrose and St. Gregory.
For a time music became the handmaid of the Church, but it thereby, to
a certain extent, also gave voice to the lyrical feelings of the
people; for the chorister and composer not only embodied popular songs
into the chants, but in many instances interpolated the words
themselves. This incongruity at length necessitated the reform,
brought about by Palestrina--the father of sacred music as we now know
it--whose _Missa Papae Marcelli_, performed in 1565, established a
type which has been more or less adhered to ever since. The services
of the Church gave rise to the oratorio, which, however, chiefly owes
its development to Protestant genius, more especially to Handel. In
1540 San Filippo Neri formed in Milan a Society called "Le
congregazione dei Padri dell' Oratorio" (from _orare_ to pray), and we
are told by Crescembini that "The oratorio, a poetical composition,
formerly a commixture of the dramatic and narrative styles, but now
entirely a musical drama, had its origin from San Filippo Neri, who in
his chapel, after sermons and other devotions, in order to allure
young people to pious offices, and to detain them from earthly
pleasures, had hymns, psalms, and such like prayers sung by one or
more voices." "Among these spiritual songs were dialogues; and these
entertainments, becoming more frequent and improving every year, were
the occasion that, in the seventeenth century, oratorios were
invented, so called from their origin."[A]
Then came the fulness of the Renaissance, quickening dead forms into
new life, laying its vivifying touch on the new-born art, music, and
making it its nursling. At first the change was hardly perceptible. It
was church music out of church, fine, stately, what may with seeming
paradox be called statuesque, which came to bear the name of
_L'Opera_, signifying _The Work_:--but, though born to a heritage of
good aims, possessed of very inadequate means for their fulfilment.
Once liberated from its presumed function of expressing religious
feeling, and thus subjected to other impelling forces, music could not
long remain in the old forms. It began to feel its way into new
channels, and in the form of the opera became a national institution.
Its growth at first was weak and faulty; but finally it developed into
a perfect art. It was as the novice, who, freed from the sanctity of
the convent with its calm lights and shadows, enters at last the
portals of the life of the world--a varied world full of turmoil,
passion, and strife. A greater world, after all, than that quitted,
because composed of so many possibilities in so many directions, and
comprising the sufferings, the joys, the aspirations of such
innumerably differentiated beings; a world wherein the novice learns
to widen her sympathies, to feel with and for the people, and to
express for them the never-ceasing craving for something beyond the
fleeting moment. At first, therefore, the stately art and the musical
needs of the people were dissimilar and apart; but little by little
each gave to and took from the other, till at length, out of the
marriage of these elementaries, a third arose to become the expression
of the life of the people, partaking in likeness of both, having lost
certain qualities, having gained many more, becoming richer, broader,
more eclectic--in short, developing into the more fitting expression
of the manifold aspirations of modern days, when life is varied and
intense, and the mind gropes blindly in every direction.
This development is traceable in all art, and in the sphere of music
it is most manifest in the opera. Like all great movements the opera
began humbly. Towards the end of the sixteenth century a number of
amateurs in Florence, dissatisfied with the polyphonic school of
music, combined "to revive the musical declamation of the Greeks," to
wed poetry and music--so long dissevered--to make the music follow the
inflexion of the voice and the sense of the words. The first opera was
"Il Conte Ugolino," composed by Vicenzio Galileo--father of the famous
astronomer--and it was followed by various others, the titles of which
need not here be recorded. At first, such performances took place in
the palaces of nobles on grand occasions, when frequently both
performers and musicians were of high rank. At length, however, in
1637 a famous theorbo player, Benedetto Farrari, and Francesco
Manetti, the composer, opened in Venice an opera-house at their own
risk, and a little later brought out with great success "Le nozzi di
Peleo e di Telide" by Cavalli, a disciple of Monteverde, and it was
henceforth that the opera became, as we have said, a national
institution. Schools for singing were opened in Rome, Naples, and
Venice--the science of music made rapid strides--instruments for
orchestral purposes naturally likewise improved in quality and in
variety; and the opera developed continuously in breadth of treatment
and form in the hands of Scarlatti, Leo, Jommelli, and Cimarosa.
About the beginning of the eighteenth century a rival to the _serious_
opera sprang up in Naples--the _comic_ opera, the direct offspring of
the people, and of lower artistic standing. But as the serious opera
became more stately, more scientific, more purely formal, less human,
less the expression of direct feeling, cultivated more for art's sake
solely, the comic opera throve on the very qualities that its elder
sister rejected, till at length the greatest musicians of the day,
Pergolesi, Cimarosa, Mozart, wrote their masterpieces for it.
Ultimately the two were fused into one, that is, into the modern
Italian opera. The comic opera, as we now understand it, is of French
origin.
From Italy the opera found its way into other countries with varying
results. In England it took early root, and assimilated itself with
the earlier _masques_ which were played at Whitehall and at Inns of
Court. In the early productions in this country, however, the music
was merely incidental. During the Commonwealth, an opera entitled "The
Siege of Rhodes," composed by Dr. Charles Colman, Captain Henry Cook,
Henry Lawes, and George Hudson, was performed in 1655, under the
express license of Cromwell. Purcell seems, however, to have been the
first to see the possibility of a national English opera;--his music
to Dryden's "King Arthur," and to the "Indian Queen," is considered
very beautiful; "his recitative was as rhetorically perfect as
Lulli's, but infinitely more natural, and frequently impassioned to
the last degree; his airs are not in the Italian form, but breathe
rather the spirit of unfettered natural melody, and stand forth as
models of refinement and freedom." "The Beggar's Opera," set to music
by Dr. Pepusch, and Dr. Arne's "Artaxerxes," a translation from
Metastasia's libretto, adapted to melodious music, were deservedly
popular, and long retained a place on the stage. Nevertheless, when
the Italian opera became an institution in England, the national opera
made no further progress. During the last few years the former seems
to have practically died out in England, and it remains to be seen in
what form the English opera will revive and flourish once more as a
national product. We have good promise in the works of such musicians
as Balfe, Wallace, Sterndale Bennet, Sir G. A. Macfarren, Dr. A. C.
Mackenzie, Sir Arthur Sullivan, Mr. C. V. Stanford, and others.
The end of the sixteenth and end of the seventeenth centuries form
what has been called "the golden age of English music--aye for all
musical Europe--of the madrigal. Nowhere was the cultivation of that
noble form of pure vocal music, whether in composition or in
performance, followed with more zeal or success than in England." The
Hon. Roger North, Attorney-General to James II., in his _Memories of
Musick_, speaks thus of the state of music in the first half of the
seventeenth century--"Afterwards these (Italian _fantazias_) were
imitated by the English, who, working more elaborately, improved upon
their patterne, which gave occasion to an observation, that in vocall
the Italians, and in instrumental music the English excelled." Again
he alludes to "those authors whose performance gained the nation the
credit in excelling the Italians in all but vocall." In instrumental
music, then, in the madrigal, the cantata, and in ecclesiastical
music, England prospered. Among her most important composers were John
Dowland, Ford, Henry Lawes, John Jenkens, Pelham Humphreys, Wise,
Blow, Henry Purcell--great in secular and ecclesiastical works, in
instrumental and in vocal--Croft and Weldon; all were predecessors of
Handel, who, though one of the greatest of German composers, lived
nearly fifty years in England, composed several operas and all his
famous oratorios for England, and is therefore not unjustifiably added
to the list of English composers.
The opera was first introduced into France by Cardinal Mazarin early
in the seventeenth century, but the lyrical drama owes its origin in
that country to Lulli, who also introduced into it the ballet, which
was a favourite pastime of the young king Louis XIV. The ballet has
since become an integral part of the French and also of the later
Italian operas. It was Lulli, again, who extended the "meagre prelude"
of the Italian opera into the overture as we now know it. But as the
rise and progress of the French opera is fully portrayed in the
following musical sketches, it is needless to trace it further here.
Germany--equally with Italy the land of music, but of harmonious in
contra-distinction to melodic music, which belongs most properly to
Italy, well named the land of song--was much later in developing her
musical powers than Italy, but she cultivated them to grander and
nobler proportions; for to Germany we owe the magnificent development
of instrumental music, which culminates in the form of the sonata for
the piano, and in that of the symphony for the orchestra, in the hands
of such masters as Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. In Germany the
opera took root by means of a translation of Rinaccini's "Dafne," set
to music by Henry Schütz in 1627, with Italian airs and German
recitative. The first German opera or _singspiel_, "Adam und Eva," by
Johann Theil, was performed in 1678, but it became national through
the works of Reinhard Keiser, whose opera "Basilino" was performed in
1693. "His style was purely German, less remarkable for its rhetorical
perfection than that of Lulli, but exhibiting far greater variety of
expression, and more earnest endeavour to attain that spirit of
Dramatic Truth which alone can render such music worthy of its
intended purpose." He was worthily followed by Hasse, Grann, by
Mozart's "Le Nozze di Figaro," "Die Zauberflöte," "Don Giovanni," and
by Beethoven's one opera "Fidelio."
The growth of a national opera in Germany and France, competing with
that of Italy, induced also the rise of party quarrels between the
adherents of the several schools; and the history of music
demonstrates the fact, often seen in the history of politics, that in
such contentions the real point at issue--the _excellence_ of the
subject in question--is lost sight of in the fierce strife of
opponents; the broader issues are obscured in the narrowing
influences of mere partizanship, wherein each side on principle shuts
its eyes equally to the merits of its adversary and to its own faults.
Thus in the following sketches are recorded the quarrels between the
adherents of Lulli and Rameau, Handel and Bonacini, Piccini and Gluck,
Mozart and Salieri, Weber and Rossini, and in the present day between
the advocates of Wagner's "Music of the Future" and those of the
"Music of the Past." "The old order changes, giving place to new," but
only after a long protracted struggle, a struggle that will not be
productive of good as long as the bitterness of partizanship exists,
whose aim is wholly to annihilate its adversary, though thereby much
that is good and fine be lost. This is not, however, the place to
discuss the importance of such strife, nor the comparative advantages
and disadvantages of its existence or non-existence--but it is as well
to draw attention to it in order to point out that in the history of
music the belligerents are usually blind to the important fact that,
inasmuch as nations differ essentially in ways of thought and action,
in character, temperament, and fundamental nature, so also must the
various phases of art differ which are their mediums of expression.
The history of the art of music is divisible into two great
epochs--the first dating from its birth about three centuries ago
under the impelling influences of the Renaissance, to the end of the
eighteenth century, when pseudo-classicism had given all it had to
give; the second dating from the rise of Romanticism in the beginning
of the nineteenth century to the present day. The revival of the
"forgotten world of old romance--that world of wonder and mystery and
spiritual beauty," no longer crippled by lack of science, and fettered
by asceticism, was to music, that youngest of the arts, a novel
influence, which pushed it vigorously in a new direction, towards the
more direct expression of the cravings of humanity--making it more
_human_, more the fitting medium expression of this democratic age.
The true romantic feeling has been described as "the ever present
apprehension of the spiritual world, and of that struggle of the soul
with earthly conditions." This later period gave "new seeing to our
eyes, which were once more opened to the mysteries and the wonder of
the universe, and the romance of man's destiny; it revived, in short,
the romantic spirit enriched by the clarity and sanity that the
renascence was able to lend."
In the opera Gluck was one of the earliest masters who came under the
influence of the new movement, and he anticipated Wagner in many of
his reforms. He decreased the importance of the singer, and increased
that of the orchestra, elaborated the recitative, and made the music
to follow the rhythm of the words, and he also gave importance to the
dramatic expression of the human emotions. In Germany Weber is styled
the Father of the Romantic opera, as in France the most noteworthy
figure is Berlioz, and the new method was further developed in the
instrumental music by Schumann, and demonstrated by other musicians,
dead and living, who, from the limited space of this volume, have not
been specially noticed--Liszt, Franz, Thomas, Brahms, Rubenstein,
Dvorák, Massinet, Bizet, Jensen, Grieg, and others. Gounod, is, of
course, unmistakably under the same influence, and may be considered
as the direct descendant of Gluck, and there is every reason to
suppose that he is the last great composer of the grand opera of
France, as Verdi is undeniably that of the Italian opera. The most
remarkable figure of the movement, he who has carried it to its utmost
limits, is Richard Wagner. At first he refused for his compositions
the name of "Music of the Future," and desired for them the more
comprehensive term of "Work of Art of the Future." It is impossible to
predict to what extent his theories will be followed: it is not
desirable that they should be blindly worked out by musicians of power
inferior to his; but they are in the right direction, and may
ultimately bring about a new art mode in music. The resources of art
are endless, being, as the Abbé Lamennais tells us, to man what
creation is to God; and music may safely be trusted to develop in such
a way as to ever be the most fitting expression of the inarticulate
cravings and aspirations of the human soul. Wagner has attempted to
unite the three arts of Painting, Poetry, and Music: and of his work a
competent judge has written--"The musical drama is undoubtedly the
highest manifestation of which men are capable. All the most refined
arts are called in to contribute to the idea. The author of a musical
drama is no more a musician, or a poet, or a painter; he is the
supreme _artist_, not fettered by the limits of one art, but able to
step over the boundaries of all the different branches of æsthetic
composition, and find the proper means for rendering his thought
wherever he wants it. This was Wagner's aim. His latter works,
'Tristram and Isolde,' the 'Niebelungen Ring,' and 'Parsifal,' are the
actuation of the theory, or at least are works showing what is the way
towards the aim." Another eminent critic, Mr. Walter Pater, writing
upon the fine arts, tells us that "_All art constantly aspires towards
the condition of music_.... It is the art of music which most
completely realises this artistic ideal, this perfect identification
of form and matter. In its ideal consummate moments, the end is not
distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from
the expression; they inhere in and completely saturate each other; and
to it, therefore, to the condition of its perfect moments, all the
arts may be supposed constantly to tend and aspire. Music, then, and
not poetry, as is so often supposed, is the true type or measure of
consummate art. Therefore, although each art has its incommunicable
element, its untranslatable order of impressions, its unique mode of
reaching the 'imaginative reason,' yet the arts may be represented as
continually struggling after the law or principle of music, to a
condition which music alone completely realises."
We may rest assured--as assured as Emerson or Matthew Arnold
concerning the illimitable possibilities of poetry--that the future
has great riches in store for all lovers of music. Giants, indeed, are
they who are no longer among us, but it is not derogatory to these
great ones to believe and hope that--life being "moving music"
according to the definition of the Syrian Gnostics--the world will yet
be electrified by the genius of successors worthy of such royal
ancestry as Handel and Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner.