Produced by Al Haines
[Frontispiece: W. S. B. MATHEWS.]
THE
MASTERS AND THEIR MUSIC
A SERIES OF ILLUSTRATIVE PROGRAMS, WITH
BIOGRAPHICAL, ESTHETICAL, AND
CRITICAL ANNOTATIONS
DESIGNED AS AN INTRODUCTION TO
MUSIC AS LITERATURE
FOR THE USE OF CLUBS, CLASSES, AND
PRIVATE STUDY
BY
W. S. B. MATHEWS
Author of "How to Understand Music," "A Popular History of Music,"
"Music: Its Ideals and Methods," "Studies in Phrasing," "Standard
Grades," Etc., Etc.
Philadelphia
Theodore Presser
1708 Chestnut Str.
COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY THEO. PRESSER
PREFACE.
When a musical student begins to think of music as a literature and to
inquire about individualities of style and musical expression, it is
necessary for him to come as soon as possible to the fountainheads of
this literature in the works of a few great masters who have set the
pace and established the limits for all the rest. In the line of
purely instrumental music this has been done by Bach, Haydn, Mozart,
Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, and Wagner. The
latter, who exercised a vast influence upon the manner of developing a
musical thought and in the selection of the orchestral colors in which
it can be expressed advantageously, powerfully stimulated all composers
later than himself, nevertheless exerted this influence at second-hand,
so to say, never having written purely instrumental movements, but
merely dramatic accompaniments of one intensity or another. Hence, for
our present purposes we may leave Wagner out altogether. Practically,
down to about the year 1875, everything in instrumental music is
original with the masters already mentioned, or was derived from them
or suggested by them. Hence, in order to understand instrumental music
we have, first of all, to make a beginning with the peculiarities,
individualities, beauty, and mastership of these great writers. Such
is the design of the following programs and explanatory matter.
My first intention has been to provide for the regular study of a
musical club, in which the playing is to be contributed by active
members designated in advance, the accessory explanations to be read
from these pages. I have thought that the playing might be divided
between several members, through which means the labor for each would
be reduced, and, on the whole, an intimate familiarity with the music
be more widely extended in the club. This method will have the
disadvantage of leaving a part of every program less well interpreted
than the others, whereby it will sometimes happen that valuable parts
will not be properly appreciated. The advantages of this method,
however, will outweigh the defects, since the awakening influence of a
course of study of this character will greatly depend upon having as
many members as possible practically interested in it.
While designed primarily for the use of a club, this course is equally
well adapted to serve as a manual for individual study, in which case
the individual himself will necessarily study every composition upon
the list, and advance to a new program only after having completely
mastered each and understood its relation to the remainder of the
course. The only exception to this rule will be in the case where
several programs of increasing difficulty are given. In this case the
player should take the easiest; after mastering this, let him go on to
the next most difficult, and, having succeeded with this, if possible
let him attack the most difficult given. In case the latter should be
impracticable for his technical resources, let him at least familiarize
himself with the general features of all of the pieces mentioned, and
get into their meaning and beauty as much as he can.
The course is also well adapted for use as a text-book in female
seminaries and the like. In this case the forms of a musical club or
definite musical organization had better be observed, and the meetings
conducted weekly or bi-weekly. The teacher should remember that all
the most important works, in which the maturity and mastership of the
composer come to their fullest expression, should be studied by the
most advanced members of the class, according to their ability, and
afterward played by the teacher himself, should he happen to possess
the necessary technical qualifications. When the maturity of the
teacher comes in to supplement the immaturity of the pupil, after the
latter has done his best, the best results will be produced.
It will be noticed, and with disappointment to some, that the analyses
and comments are free from so-called "poetry," and gush of every kind.
Particularly are they free from attempts to connect each piece with a
story or poetic idea. In the opinion of the writer, the first step
toward musical growth lies in learning to appreciate music, as music.
In instrumental music the development of a musical idea, the creation
of musical symmetries, figures, and arabesques, and the legitimate
building up of musical climaxes upon purely harmonic and rhythmic
grounds are the phases of thought which interested the composer and
gave rise to the composition. And while we may not attempt to assign
limits to the inspiration and uplifting effects of great tone-poetry,
it is quite certain that effects and influences of this kind are
arrived at in the consciousness of the listener only when purely
musical appreciation is active and deep. Without the background of
living musical appreciation of this kind, the highest flights of the
composer will pass as mere noise and fury, the hearer being in no whit
uplifted or inspired. The uplifting which comes from the supposed
assistance of a "story" or a poetic idea attached to the composition by
some outside person is quite likely to fail of being the same in
quality as that intended by the composer. Music is one thing, poetry
another. While aiming at like ends,--the expression of spiritual
beauty,--they move in different planes, which in the more highly
organized minds are not proximate. The hearer specially gifted in
music does not need the story or the poem; he finds it a hindrance.
The hearer specially gifted in poetic sensibility does not care very
much for the music; to him it is merely a foreign speech, trying to say
vaguely and imperfectly what the poetry has said definitely and well.
To put the immature and unspecialized hearer upon the poetic track as
an aid to understanding a piece of music is, therefore, to place him at
a disadvantage, leading him to expect phenomena which he will find only
in literature; just the same as it would be a mistake to intrude pieces
of music as explanations in a course in poetry or imaginative
literature.
There is a time in both cases when these accessory or related provinces
of mind can be called into friendly activity to the advantage of each
other. In a poetic training this might be at the point where the
motive of the poem is of that vague, mystical character--a mere
soul-mood--which words express so imperfectly; or, in a course of
music, when it is a question of a piece in which the composer has
definitely attempted to express a poetical idea--as happens often in
dramatic music, occasionally in symphonic poems and elsewhere. Here
the outside help is needed not so much in order to explain the music as
to supplement its shortcomings. But in the earlier stages of musical
training in this higher sense, purely musical observation (not so much
technical as esthetic) comes first, since without this all our
rhapsodies upon the greater works signify nothing.
In the course of the book there are two essays embodied which are very
important to the true mastery of the material. They are the essay upon
"Moving Forces in Music," the first chapter, and that upon "The Typical
Forms of Music," at the end of Part I. The first should be taken up
where it occurs. The other may be left to the end or introduced at any
stage of the discussion preferred by the student or by the conductor of
the class or club.
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
PART I.
THE MASTERS AND THEIR MUSIC.
CHAPTER I.
MOVING FORCES IN MUSIC
CHAPTER II.
BACH AND HÄNDEL
The importance of Bach in the world of music. Pleasing and
representative compositions.
CHAPTER III.
HAYDN AND MOZART
The importance of Haydn as the creator of the sonata.
CHAPTER IV.
CHARACTERISTIC MOODS OF BEETHOVEN
CHAPTER V.
BACH, MOZART, AND BEETHOVEN COMPARED
CHAPTER VI.
SCHUBERT AND MENDELSSOHN
CHAPTER VII.
ROBERT SCHUMANN
CHAPTER VIII.
CHOPIN
CHAPTER IX.
BACH, BEETHOVEN, SCHUMANN, AND CHOPIN IN THE DIFFERENT
PHASES OF THEIR ART
CHAPTER X.
LISZT
CHAPTER XI.
BACH, BEETHOVEN, CHOPIN, SCHUMANN, LISZT
CHAPTER XII.
CONCERNING THE TYPICAL MUSICAL FORMS
PART II.
MODERN MASTERS AND AMERICAN COMPOSERS.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
CHAPTER I.
NATIONALITY IN MUSIC
CHAPTER II.
JOHANNES BRAHMS
CHAPTER III.
EDVARD GRIEG
CHAPTER IV.
RUBINSTEIN AND TSCHAIKOWSKY
CHAPTER V.
THE LATER ROMANTICISTS
CHAPTER VI.
GOTTSCHALK AND MASON
CHAPTER VII.
E. A. MACDOWELL
CHAPTER VIII.
ARTHUR FOOTE AND MRS. H. H. A. BEACH
CHAPTER IX.
MISCELLANEOUS PROGRAM BY AMERICAN COMPOSERS
ILLUSTRATIONS
W. S. G. Mathews . . . . . . . . . _Frontispiece_
Joh. Sebastian Bach, Geo. Fred. Handel
Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang A. Mozart
Ludwig van Beethoven
Franz Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn
Robert Schumann
Frederic Francois Chopin
Franz Liszt
PART I.
THE MASTERS AND THEIR MUSIC.
CHAPTER I.
MOVING FORCES IN MUSIC
The art of music shows the operation of several moving forces, or
motives, which have presented themselves to the composer with
sufficient force to inspire the creation of the works we have. The
most important of these motives is the Musical Sense itself, since it
is to this we owe the creation of the folk-song, with its pleasing
symmetries, and the greater part of the vast literature of instrumental
music.
Aside from the expression of the musical consciousness as such, the
composer has been moved at times by the motive of Dramatic Expression.
In opera, for example, a great deal of the music has for its object to
intensify the feeling of the scene. Accordingly, the composer
carefully selects those combinations and sequences of tones which in
his opinion best correspond with the dramatic moment they are intended
to accompany. And since many of these moments are of extreme
intensity, even tragic in character, very strong and intense
combinations of tones are sometimes employed, such as could not be
justified in an instrumental composition to be played independently of
any illustrative scenery or story.
There is a third motive of composition which also has had a large place
in the development of instrumental music--viz., the Expression of the
Individual Mood of the Composer; and the further we come down in the
history of music, the more unrestricted we find the operation of this
motive.
In the order of development, the purely musical is entitled to the
first place; and it has also been the principal moving cause in the
development of the art of music, from its universality--its power to
act upon all grades of musical consciousness according to the ability
of the individual musician. For example, the desire to realize in
tones agreeable symmetries of rhythm and strong antitheses of melodic
sequence has given rise to the folk songs, all of which operate upon
what are now very elementary lines, since they never exceed very simple
and obvious rhythmic proportions and the most common chords of the key.
Recent investigations of the music of barbarous and half-civilized
tribes show that the attainment of symmetry in the folk-song is a
somewhat late experience. In many of the songs of the American
Indians, for example, the first phrase moves practically along the
track of the common chord; the second phrase frequently repeats the
first, and in some instances the repetition goes on indefinitely
without any answer or conclusion. In other cases a second phrase
follows along the track of a closely related chord, but I have never
noticed a case in which a third phrase appeared, corresponding to the
first, after a digression of the second phrase into another chord.
Generally the rhythm runs out with a series of what might be called
inarticulate drum-beats, as if an impulse existed still unsatisfied,
blindly making itself felt in these insignificant pulsations; an
impulse which a finer melodic sense would have satisfied by the proper
antithesis in relation to the first phrase, thus leaving the melody and
the rhythm to complete themselves together, as always takes place in
civilized music.
The art of music seems to be an evolution from the sense of number and
the feeling for the common chord, combined with a certain fondness for
reverie, which in the earlier stages of the art was perhaps
semi-religious in character, and in the later stages is more nearly
related to the dance, until finally, in the highest stage, it is a
reverie of the beautiful or the pathetic, pure and simple. The
existence of the harmonic sense in rude natures, where music has not
been heard, seems very difficult to account for, since, while it is
true that any resonant tone contains the partial tones constituting the
common chord, a resonant tone is very seldom heard among rude
surroundings; and the discovery of the instinct of barbarous melodies
to work themselves along the track of the chord is one of those
unexpected finds of modern investigation which, while at first seeming
to explain many things, are themselves excessively difficult to account
for.
In a sense, there is no difference in kind between the folk-song and
the most complete and highly organized art-music; that is to say, both
alike are primarily due to the operation of simple musical instincts
working off along the track of rhythmic proportion and harmonic
relation. The vast difference in the grade of the results attained is
due to the capacity of the composers. The simple man giving himself up
to reverie and being gifted with a certain amount of musical feeling,
produces a commonplace melody of serious import or of lively rhythm
according to the nature of the reverie in which he indulges. This is
to him a complete expression of his mood, and it is received as such by
others in like state.
A Bach, a Beethoven, or a Schumann, giving himself up to tonal reverie,
will also arrive at more or less symmetrical melodic forms
proportionate to the mood of the composer and the idea which he is
seeking to bring to expression; but instead of his reverie terminating
at the end of one or two periods, as is invariably the case with the
simple man (an additional idea having to be sought with much diligence
and imperfect success), he goes on for a series of periods, and perhaps
develops a quite long discourse, all having relation to the simple
conception with which he started and to a fundamental mood. It is
evident that, owing to the time consumed in writing out a musical
discourse, the high composer will not have been able to complete his
composition, or at least the written expression of it, at a single
sitting; and upon examining it we do, in fact, find it to consist of
successive chapters or paragraphs, each one of which might be taken as
the expression of a mood, and all having reference to the central mood
underlying the beginning, which by the arrangement of material
necessarily becomes the characteristic mood of the entire work.
Moreover, Bach, Beethoven, or Schumann, in bringing their tonal mood to
expression, will permit themselves all sorts of freedom in bringing
together unexpected motives, rhythms, or chords, and the result,
consequently, will be of a very different character from that attained
by the composer of simple pieces, and will, therefore, be intelligible
to those only who have the musical capacity to realize these more
remote and less obvious relations.
Our composer also will have embraced in his tonal reverie, or at least
in the extreme moments of it, all those extraordinary means of intense
musical expression which the dramatic composer may have found out in
his effort to represent the tragic and extreme moments of dramatic
complication. And thus the tendency of the musical art is constantly
toward the complex, and toward the bringing together of relations so
subtle as to have been unintelligible to earlier musicians, and
unintelligible now, at first hearing, to common ears, lacking in these
finer perceptions of advanced musical endowment. It is to be noticed,
however, that these extraordinary combinations and relations of the
advanced composer occur only at remote intervals in the works of any of
the great masters. The extremely intense or dramatic or tragic is not
the staple of human life. They are incidents in a checkered and
tempest-tossed existence, and the music representing these moods is
also a little outside the range of the purely beautiful.
In one department of the higher art of music--viz., that of
symphony--there has been a working-out of the taste for the symmetric,
the well proportioned, and the agreeable sounding; in other words, the
beautiful as to proportion, charm of melody, and the satisfactory in
harmony. In symphony the tragic and the extremely dramatic have had
but a limited realization, while the purely beautiful in tonal relation
has been the main creative motive. This we find in Mozart and
Beethoven to a remarkable degree.
The general color of instrumental music, or its increasing complexity
and high flavor, has been very much influenced by the writers of songs,
as well as by the dramatic composers writing for the stage. There have
been a few great geniuses in the art of music who, while gifted with a
wide musical fantasy of their own, have taken pleasure in deriving
their inspiration from poetry, and have occupied a large part of their
time as creative composers in setting to music such lyric texts as
interested them. In this way Schubert, for example, wrote something
like 700 songs, Schumann a considerable number, and there have been
various other composers who have written extensively in this line. The
experience of the song-writer has, on the whole, been of great use to
instrumental music, since it has tended not alone to diversify the
music by encouraging a freer and more graphic employment of tonal
forms, but also to retain the melody within the compass suitable to the
voice and to preserve the agreeable proportions of phrases, such as we
already find in poetic meters. Still, the fact remains that for
intensification and for the extravagant element in the higher art of
music, the dramatic composer is the influence mainly to be thanked,
since in opera all these things are done upon so much larger a scale
and with so much greater intensity.
It is not easy in words to point out how extremely large a factor in
art-music is the operation of the unconscious. Instinct governed the
operation of Bach and Beethoven almost as much as it does the swimming
of the swan or the flying of the pigeon. For although the instinct of
tonal relations is not one of those universal endowments shared by
every individual to the same degree, there have appeared in the art of
music a series of remarkable geniuses who seem to have had within
themselves the power to turn all kinds of moods and experiences into
musical expression. What part of this was due to fortunate heredity,
and what to environment, and how much to original genius, pure and
simple, it is impossible to say. The nature of genius always remains a
mystery. At the same time, the currency which the music of these
masters has gained in the world, and still maintains, goes to show that
the instinct which governed them in putting together tonal forms for
expressing delight, and for operating upon the feelings of the hearer,
is not different in essence from that of the common listener; since
experience shows that all this music affords gratification to the great
majority of individuals who can be brought to listen to it a few times.
Of course, it is not to be expected that a casual hearer, inattentive,
it may be, and unaccustomed to remembering what he has heard, will be
impressed by a long instrumental composition to the same degree as a
practised hearer, and especially a hearer who has already followed the
composition through several times before; but the longest symphony or
sonata always contains a variety of moments which are intensely
pleasing to the ordinary hearer listening seriously to them for the
first time. The difference between the casual hearer and the more
cultivated one is that with practice will come a perception of a larger
number of these attractive moments, and finally, at last, the
realization of the entire discourse as a one, having a central idea; in
the same way as in a sermon a casual hearer notices here and there an
idea which strikes him; then he goes off into reverie, and is only
recalled by some other striking idea which attracts his attention,
while the trained hearer may have followed the discourse entirely, and
found it interesting from first to last.
Moreover, the repeated experience of hearing brings out in ordinary
listeners a capacity which they had not previously realized--viz., the
experience of feeling in connection with the music. We are still very
far from understanding the relation between music and feeling. The
most that is known about it as yet is that to a listener of even a very
slight amount of experience the minor chord suggests unhappiness, while
the major chord sounds brighter and more agreeable; a pleasant rhythm,
somewhat lively, betokens cheerfulness; a slow and heavy rhythm
betokens seriousness, perhaps sadness; but beyond this elementary
beginning of musical feeling, which is common to the most
insignificantly endowed individuality, there is a vast world of finer
sensibilities connected with music. A certain chord, or succession of
chords, or especially a certain melo-harmonic phrase, touches the
sensitive ear with a peculiar thrill, and this happens over and over
again, and continually in the more fortunate works of all the great
masters, when followed by sympathetic hearers. The point in this
connection which we have to notice is that the capacity of feeling to
be touched and awakened by tonal incitations is practically universal
as regards civilized man. The extent of the influence which music will
exert varies enormously in individual cases, but from the fact that
every normal hearer will be touched more and more by music with a
little practice in hearing it; that the number of those who are
extremely sensitive to this form of spiritual suggestion is much larger
than is ordinarily supposed; and from the fact of this capacity in the
average individual, and the universality of the admiration awakened by
the works of the great geniuses in music, it is a fair conclusion that
the future is destined to throw more light upon this obscure part of
the psycho-musical capacity of mankind; and it is obvious, as said
before, that the great geniuses whose works are demonstrated to contain
this power to touch hearers had this endowment in an extraordinary
degree, but not to such a degree as need place any bar upon the popular
appreciation of their music, if a comparatively small amount of
education has been given in hearing.
To sum up, then, the results arrived at in this discussion. The
programs and discussions now about to be undertaken have been arranged
for the purpose of assisting the listener to a recognition of the
peculiarities and individual charms of the works of the masters
represented, and also, incidentally, to afford the listener a certain
education in the art of hearing, and, by bringing together strongly
contrasted musical moments, to afford the musical feeling a strong
incitation, in the hope of awakening in every listener this capacity of
musical delight, when the sense of the beautiful and of the expressive
is appealed to through exquisite tonal incitation.
All the music in these chapters, without exception, has been created
upon musical grounds, since it is the instinctive following out of
musical ideas which has operated through the greater part of them,
while the pursuit of the highly dramatic and strongly marked has had
but a small influence.
The higher musical fancy has many ways of expressing itself or of
elaborating musical ideas, but there are two of its characteristic
modes which the student will do well to observe at the start. These
are what I call the "thematic" and the "lyric." The ordinary
folk-song, which starts off with a melodic phrase, this phrase being
partly answered, followed by a third phrase like the first, and then a
final answer, is the general type of the lyric moment. The thematic is
generally based upon a short phrase or melodic figure, and this figure
is repeated over and over in a variety of ways and different chords and
the like until a complete idea is formed from it. These two modes of
construction are traced at greater length in the concluding essay in
this work on "The Typical Musical Forms," and the student will do well
to fortify himself from time to time by reference to that chapter.
In all the programs of this course there is one caution which the
student will do well to observe: All kinds of technical analysis of
art-works put the hearer in a mood essentially different from that
necessary for properly enjoying the works as art. Every art work is
intended to awaken an artistic delight after its kind. In painting, a
delight in form and color, and in some a kind of suggestion or story by
means of them. In music, a delight in tone and tonal relations and
rhythm, and always a sense of tonal beauty, with a strong flavor of
feeling awakened by means of them. This entire expression of musical
masterworks belongs to the unconscious operation of mind, and the
hearer who occupies himself with the effort to recognize all the
various devices and artifices of the composer, and to follow the form
as such, or who occupies himself mainly with the idea of the story
which the composer is trying to tell, puts himself in a wrong attitude
for deriving the most complete gratification from the work. In a
cultivated realization of the beauty of a great musical masterwork,
these perceptions of technical skill on the part of the composer no
doubt enter to some degree, but they are always more or less in the
background, and form a part of the actual pleasure of hearing the
symphony or the sonata scarcely more than the capital initials and
punctuation marks enter into the enjoyment of a poem. All the
incidents of punctuation and typography we take instinctively, and are
conscious of them only when some one of them is missing and an error
exists in the work. This is the case with music. Symmetry and flow of
imagination are presupposed. Hence, whatever analyses may be made in
the class as a part of the operation of studying these different
master-works, the end to be sought by the student is the enjoyment of
the work as music; to take an active and lively pleasure in the melody;
to feel the harmony and the rhythm; to enjoy the contrast of the
different moods, and so on. Every piece in the entire list is a voice
in which the composer speaks to us, and the question is not the How,
but the What.