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* * * * *
THE ART OF MUSIC
The Art of Music
A Comprehensive Library of Information
for Music Lovers and Musicians
Editor-in-Chief
DANIEL GREGORY MASON
Columbia University
Associate Editors
EDWARD B. HILL LELAND HALL
Harvard University Past Professor, Univ. of Wisconsin
Managing Editor
CÉSAR SAERCHINGER
Modern Music Society of New York
In Fourteen Volumes
Profusely Illustrated
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
THE NATIONAL SOCIETY OF MUSIC
[Illustration: Home Concert]
_Painting by Fritz von Uhde_
THE ART OF MUSIC: VOLUME SEVEN
Pianoforte and Chamber Music
Department Editor:
LELAND HALL, M.A.
Past Professor of Musical History, University of Wisconsin
Introduction by
HAROLD BAUER
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
THE NATIONAL SOCIETY OF MUSIC
Copyright, 1915, by
THE NATIONAL SOCIETY OF MUSIC, Inc.
[All Rights Reserved]
PREFATORY NOTE
The editor has not attempted to give within the limits of this single
volume a detailed history of the development of both pianoforte and
chamber music. He has emphasized but very little the historical
development of either branch of music, and he has not pretended to
discuss exhaustively all the music which might be comprehended under
the two broad titles.
The chapters on pianoforte music are intended to show how the great
masters adapted themselves to the exigencies of the instrument, and in
what manner they furthered the development of the difficult technique
of writing for it. Also, because the piano may be successfully treated
in various ways, and because it lends itself to the expression of
widely diverse moods, there is in these chapters some discussion of the
great masterpieces of pianoforte literature in detail.
The arrangement of material is perhaps not usual. What little has been
said about the development of the piano, for example, has been said in
connection with Beethoven, who was the first to avail himself fully of
the advantages the piano offered over the harpsichord. A discussion, or
rather an analysis, of the pianoforte style has been put in the chapter
on Chopin, who is even today the one outstanding master of it.
In the part of the book dealing with chamber music the material has
been somewhat arbitrarily arranged according to combinations of
instruments. The string quartets, the pianoforte trios, quartets, and
quintets, the sonatas for violin and piano, and other combinations
have been treated separately. The selection of some works for a more
or less detailed discussion, and the omission of even the mention of
others, will undoubtedly seem unjustifiable to some; but the editor
trusts at least that those he has chosen for discussion may illumine
somewhat the general progress of chamber music from the time of Haydn
to the present day.
For the chapters on violin music before Corelli and the beginnings of
chamber music we are indebted to Mr. Edward Kilenyi, whose initials
appear at the end of these chapters.
LELAND HALL
INTRODUCTION
The term Chamber Music, in its modern sense, cannot perhaps be strictly
defined. In general it is music which is fine rather than broad,
or in which, at any rate, there is a wealth of detail which can be
followed and appreciated only in a relatively small room. It is not,
on the whole, brilliantly colored like orchestral music. The string
quartet, for example, is conspicuously monochrome. Nor is chamber
music associated with the drama, with ritual, pageantry, or display,
as are the opera and the mass. It is--to use a well worn term--very
nearly always absolute music, and, as such, must be not only perfect in
detail, but beautiful in proportion and line, if it is to be effective.
As far as externals are concerned, chamber music is made up of music
for a solo instrument, with or without accompaniment (excluding, of
course, concertos and other like forms, which require the orchestra,
and music for the organ, which can hardly be dissociated from
cathedrals and other large places), and music for small groups of
instruments, such as the string trio and the string quartet, and
combinations of diverse instruments with the piano. Many songs, too,
sound best in intimate surroundings; but one thinks of them as in a
class by themselves, not as a part of the literature of chamber music.
With very few exceptions, all the great composers have sought
expression in chamber music at one time or another; and their
compositions in this branch seem often to be the finest and the most
intimate presentation of their genius. Haydn is commonly supposed
to have found himself first in his string quartets. Mozart’s great
quartets are almost unique among his compositions as an expression
of his genius absolutely uninfluenced by external circumstances and
occasion. None of Beethoven’s music is more profound nor more personal
than his last quartets. Even among the works of the later composers,
who might well have been seduced altogether away from these fine and
exacting forms by the intoxicating glory of the orchestra, one finds
chamber music of a rich and special value.
This special value consists in part in the refined and unfailing
musical skill with which the composers have handled their slender
material; but more in the quality of the music itself. The great
works of chamber music, no matter how profound, speak in the language
of intimacy. They show no signs of the need to impress or overwhelm
an audience. Perhaps no truly great music does. But operas and even
symphonies must be written with more or less consideration for external
circumstances, whereas in the smaller forms, composers seem to be
concerned only with the musical inspiration which they feel the desire
to express. They speak to an audience of understanding friends, as it
were, before whom they may reveal themselves without thought of the
effectiveness of their speech. They seem in them to have consulted only
their ideals. They have taken for granted the sympathetic attention of
their audience.
The piano has always played a commanding rôle in the history of chamber
music. From the early days when the harpsichord with its figured bass
was the foundation for almost all music, both vocal and instrumental,
few forms in chamber music have developed independently of it, or of
the piano, its successor. The string quartet and a few combinations of
wind instruments offer the only conspicuous exceptions. The mass of
chamber music is made up of pianoforte trios, quartets, and quintets,
of sonatas for pianoforte and various other instruments; and, indeed,
the great part of pianoforte music is essentially chamber music.
It may perhaps seem strange to characterize as remarkably fine and
intimate the music which has been written for an instrument often
stigmatized as essentially unmusical. But the piano has attracted
nearly all the great composers, many of whom were excellent pianists;
and the music which they have written for it is indisputably of the
highest and most lasting worth. There are many pianoforte sonatas which
are all but symphonies, not only in breadth of form, but in depth of
meaning. Some composers, notably Beethoven and Liszt, demanded of
the piano the power of the orchestra. Yet on the whole the mass of
pianoforte music remains chamber music.
The pianoforte style is an intricate style, and to be effective must be
perfectly finished. The instrument sounds at its best in a small hall.
In a large one its worst characteristics are likely to come all too
clearly to the surface. And though it is in many ways the most powerful
of all the instruments, truly beautiful playing does not call upon its
limits of sound, but makes it a medium of fine and delicately shaded
musical thought. To regard it as an instrument suited primarily to big
and grandiose effects is grievously to misunderstand it, and is likely,
furthermore, to make one overlook the possibilities of tone color
which, though often denied it, it none the less possesses.
In order to study intelligently the mechanics, or, if you will, the
art of touch upon the piano, and in order to comprehend the variety
of tone-color which can be produced from it, one must recognize at
the outset the fact that the piano is an instrument of percussion.
Its sounds result from the blows of hammers upon taut metal strings.
With the musical sound given out by these vibrating strings must
inevitably be mixed the dull and unmusical sound of the blow that set
them vibrating. The trained ear will detect not only the thud of the
hammer against the string, but that of the finger against the key, and
that of the key itself upon its base. The study of touch and tone upon
the piano is the study of the combination and the control of these two
elements of sound, the one musical, the other unmusical.
The pianist can acquire but relatively little control over the musical
sounds of his instrument. He can make them soft and loud, but he
cannot, as the violinist can, make a single tone grow from soft to
loud and die away to soft again. The violinist or the singer both
makes and controls tone, the one by his bow, the other by his breath;
the pianist, in comparison with them, but makes tone. Having caused a
string to vibrate by striking it through a key, he cannot even sustain
these vibrations. They begin at once to weaken; the sound at once grows
fainter. Therefore he has to make his effects with a volume of sounds
which has been aptly said to be ever vanishing.
On the other hand, these sounds have more endurance than those of the
xylophone, for example; and in their brief span of failing life the
skillful pianist may work somewhat upon them according to his will.
He may cut them exceedingly short by allowing the dampers to fall
instantaneously upon the strings, thus stopping all vibrations. He may
even prolong a few sounds, a chord let us say, by using the sustaining
pedal. This lifts the dampers from all the strings, so that all vibrate
in sympathy with the tones of the chord and reënforce them, so to
speak. This may be done either at the moment the notes of the chord are
struck, or considerably later, after they have begun appreciably to
weaken. In the latter case the ear can detect the actual reënforcement
of the failing sounds.
Moreover, the use of the pedal serves to affect somewhat the color
of the sounds of the instrument. All differences in timbre depend on
overtones; and if the pianist lifts all dampers from the strings by the
pedals, he will hear the natural overtones of his chord brought into
prominence by means of the sympathetic vibrations of other strings he
has not struck. He can easily produce a mass of sound which strongly
suggests the organ, in the tone color of which the shades of overtones
are markably evident.
The study of such effects will lead him beyond the use of the pedal
into some of the niceties of pianoforte touch. He will find himself
able to suppress some overtones and bring out others by emphasizing
a note here and there in a chord of many notes, especially in an
arpeggio, and by slighting others. Such an emphasis, it is true, may
give to a series of chords an internal polyphonic significance; but if
not made too prominent, will tend rather to color the general sound
than to make an effect of distinct drawing.
It will be observed that in the matter of so handling the volume of
musical sound, prolonging it and slightly coloring it by the use of
the pedal or by skillful emphasis of touch, the pianist’s attention is
directed ever to the after-sounds, so to speak, of his instrument. He
is interested, not in the sharp, clear beginning of the sound, but in
what follows it. He finds in the very deficiencies of the instrument
possibilities of great musical beauty. It is hardly too much to say,
then, that the secret of a beautiful or sympathetic touch, which has
long been considered to be hidden in the method of striking the keys,
may be found quite as much in the treatment of sounds after the keys
have been struck. It is a mystery which can by no means be wholly
solved by a muscular training of the hands; for a great part of such
training is concerned only with the actual striking of the keys.
We have already said that striking the keys must produce more or less
unmusical sounds. These sounds are not without great value. They
emphasize rhythm, for example, and by virtue of them the piano is
second to no instrument in effects of pronounced, stimulating rhythm.
The pianist wields in this regard almost the power of the drummer to
stir men to frenzy, a power which is by no means to be despised. In
martial music and in other kinds of vigorous music the piano is almost
without shortcomings. But inasmuch as a great part of pianoforte music
is not in this vigorous vein, but rather in a vein of softer, more
imaginative beauty, the pianist must constantly study how to subject
these unmusical sounds to the after-sounds which follow them. In this
study he will come upon the secret of the legato style of playing.
If the violinist wishes to play a phrase in a smooth legato style,
he does not use a new stroke of his bow for each note. If he did so,
he would virtually be attacking the separate notes, consequently
emphasizing them, and punctuating each from the other. Fortunately for
him, he need not do so; but the pianist cannot do otherwise. Each note
he plays must be struck from the strings of his instrument by a hammer.
He can only approximate a legato style--by concealing, in one way or
another, the sounds which accompany this blow.
The so-called legato touch on the keyboard is one in which the fingers
cling closely to the keys, and by which, therefore, the keys are
pressed down rather than struck. In this way the player actually
eliminates one of the three sounds of attack, namely, that of the
finger hitting the key. To a certain extent he also minimizes the
sound of the key hitting its base, a sound which, moreover, the felt
cushion of the base does much to lessen. At the risk of throwing all
preconceived theories of legato touch into question, it may be said
that this unpleasant sound can be wholly eliminated by a sort of light,
quick, lifting touch, which, without driving the key down even to its
base, will yet cause the hammer to spring up and hit the string above
it.
By such means as these the pianist can at least subdue, if he cannot
silence, the noises which in some measure must inevitably accompany his
playing. The more he can do so, the smoother and pleasanter his playing
will become. In so far as the tone of the pianoforte can be sensuous
and warm, he can make it so in the measure in which he avoids giving
prominence to the blows and thuds which ever threaten it perilously.
The player who pounds is the player whose ear has not taken into
account this harsh and unmusical accompaniment of noises. The player
who can make the piano sing is he who, in listening to the mysterious
vibrations of its after-sounds, has come to recognize and subdue those
noises which too often interrupt and obscure them.
The value of the piano as an instrument of musical expression will
always be the subject of discussion. It has undoubtedly two great
shortcomings, which place the pianist under serious disadvantages. It
cannot sustain tone, and the tones which can be produced on it will
ever be more or less marred by unmusical noises which cannot often
be avoided. But these very shortcomings make possible some peculiar
beauties and a peculiar vitality which characterize pianoforte music
alone. And, apart from these, in its great power, its possibilities
of dynamic nuances, and its unlimited scope of harmonic effects,
it is not excelled, if, indeed, it is equalled, by any other single
instrument.
Finally, let it be remembered that there is in a great deal of
pianoforte music--in that of Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Brahms
and Debussy--almost unfailingly an intimacy of mood. It is for this
quality of intimacy that pianoforte music will long be cherished as
chamber music. It is a quality of which the player who wishes not only
to interpret great music, but also to win what there is of genuine
musical beauty from his instrument, should ever be mindful.
HAROLD BAUER
November, 1915.
CONTENTS OF VOLUME SEVEN
PAGE
PREFATORY NOTE vii
INTRODUCTION BY HAROLD BAUER ix
PART I. THE CLASSICAL PERIOD OF PIANOFORTE MUSIC
CHAPTER
I. KEYBOARD INSTRUMENTS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF KEYBOARD
TECHNIQUE 1
Keyboard instruments and their derivation; the clavichord
and its mechanism; the harpsichord and its relatives,
virginal, _cembalo_, etc.; technique and use of the
harpsichord--The beginnings of harpsichord music; the
Gabrielis and Merulo; early forms; the influence of
harmony and the crystallization of form--Frescobaldi
and other organist-composers for harpsichord; early
English virginal collections; John Bull, etc.--Genesis
of the suite; influence of lute-music; Froberger, Denis
Gaultier, etc.; Kuhnau--Development of the harpsichord
‘style’; great players: Chambonnières, etc.
II. THE GOLDEN AGE OF HARPSICHORD MUSIC 40
The period and the masters of the ‘Golden Age’--Domenico
Scarlatti; his virtuosity; Scarlatti’s ‘sonatas’;
Scarlatti’s technical effects; his style and form; æsthetic
value of his music; his contemporaries--François Couperin,
_le Grand_; Couperin’s clavecin compositions; the ‘musical
portraits’; ‘program music’--The quality and style of
his music; his contemporaries, Daquin and Rameau--John
Sebastian Bach; Bach as virtuoso; as teacher; his technical
reform; his style--Bach’s fugues and their structure--The
suites of Bach: the French suites, the English suites,
the Partitas--The preludes, toccatas and fantasies;
concertos; the ‘Goldberg Variations’--Bach’s importance;
his contemporary Handel.
III. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PIANOFORTE SONATA 89
Vienna as the home of the sonata; definition of
‘sonata’--Origin and history of the standard sonata
cycle; relationship of sonata movements--Evolution of the
‘triplex’ form: Pergolesi’s ‘singing allegro’; the union of
aria and binary forms; Padre Martini’s sonatas, Scarlatti’s
true sonata in C; Domenico Alberti; the Alberti bass; the
transitional period of the sonata--Sonata writers before
Haydn and Mozart; J. C. Bach; Muzio Clementi--Schubert and
Wagenseil; C. P. E. Bach; F. W. Rust.
IV. HAYDN, MOZART AND BEETHOVEN 131
The ‘Viennese period’ and the three great
classics--Joseph Haydn; Haydn’s clavier sonatas;
the Variations in F minor--W. A. Mozart; Mozart as
pianist and improvisator; Mozart’s sonatas; his piano
concertos--Ludwig van Beethoven; evolution of the modern
pianoforte--Musical qualities of Beethoven’s piano music;
Beethoven’s technical demands; his pianoforte sonatas;
his piano concertos; conclusion.
V. PIANOFORTE MUSIC AT THE TIME OF BEETHOVEN 175
The broadening of technical possibilities and its
consequences--Minor disciples of Mozart and Beethoven:
J. N. Hummel; J. B. Cramer; John Field; other
contemporaries--The pioneers in new forms: Weber and
Schubert; technical characteristics of Weber’s style;
Weber’s sonatas, etc.; the _Konzertstück_; qualities of
Weber’s pianoforte music--Franz Schubert as pianoforte
composer; his sonatas; miscellaneous works; the
impromptus; the Moments musicals--The Weber-Schubert era
and the dawn of the Romantic spirit.
PART II. THE ROMANTIC PERIOD OF PIANOFORTE MUSIC
VI. MENDELSSOHN, SCHUMANN AND BRAHMS 211
Influence of musical romanticism on pianoforte
literature--Mendelssohn’s pianoforte music, its
merits and demerits; the ‘Songs without Words’;
Prelude and Fugue in D minor; _Variations Sérieuses_;
Mendelssohn’s influence, Bennett, Henselt--Robert
Schumann, ultra-romanticist and pioneer; peculiarities
of his style; miscellaneous series of piano pieces;
the ‘cycles’: _Carnaval_, etc.--The _Papillons_,
_Davidsbündler_, and _Faschingsschwank_; the Symphonic
Études; _Kreisleriana_, etc., the Sonatas, Fantasy and
Concerto--Johannes Brahms; qualities of his piano music;
his style; piano sonatas, ‘Paganini Variations,’ ‘Handel
Variations,’ Capriccios, Rhapsodies, Intermezzi; the
Concertos; conclusion.
VII. CHOPIN 250
Chopin’s music and its relative value in musical
value; racial and personal characteristics; influences
and preferences; Chopin’s playing--His instinct for form;
the form of his sonatas and concertos; the
_Polonaise-Fantaisie_; the Preludes--Chopin as a harmonist;
Chopin’s style analyzed: accompaniment figures, inner
melodies, polyphonic suggestions, passages, melodies and
ornaments--His works in general: salon music; waltzes;
nocturnes; mazurkas; polonaises; conclusion.
VIII. HERZ, THALBERG, AND LISZT 284
The career of Henri Herz, his compositions and his style;
virtuosity and sensationalism; means of effect--Sigismund
Thalberg: his playing; the ‘Moses’ fantasia, etc.;
relation of Herz and Thalberg to the public--Franz Liszt:
his personality and its influence; his playing; his
expansion of pianoforte technique; difficulties of his
music estimated--Liszt’s compositions: transcriptions;
fantasia on _Don Giovanni_--Realistic pieces, Années de
pèlerinage--Absolute music: sonata in B minor; Hungarian
Rhapsodies; conclusion.
PART III. MODERN PIANOFORTE MUSIC
IX. IMITATORS AND NATIONALISTS 320
Inevitable results of Schumann, Chopin and Liszt--Heller,
Raff, Jensen, Scharwenka, Mozkowski, and other German
composers--The influence of national characteristics:
Grieg, his style and his compositions; Christian
Sinding--The Russians: Balakireff, Rubinstein,
Tschaikowsky, Arensky, Glazounoff, Rachmaninoff,
Scriabin and others--Spanish traits; I. Albéniz;
pianoforte composers in England and the United States.
X. MODERN FRENCH PIANOFORTE MUSIC 341
Classical traditions: Saint-Saëns, and others; C.
V. Alkan--César Franck: his compositions and his
style--Vincent d’Indy; Fauré--The new movement: Debussy
and Ravel; Debussy’s innovations: new harmonies, scales,
overtones, pianoforte technique; his compositions--Ravel
differentiated; his compositions; Florent Schmitt and
Eric Satie--Conclusion.
PART IV. VIOLIN MUSIC
XI. EARLY VIOLIN MUSIC AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF VIOLIN TECHNIQUE 368
The origin of stringed instruments; ancestors of the
violin--Perfection of the violin and advance in
violin technique; use of the violin in the sixteenth
century; early violin compositions in the vocal style;
Florentino Maschera and Monteverdi--Beginnings of
violin music: Biagio Marini; Quagliati; Farina; Fontana
and Mont’Albano; Merula; Ucellino and Neri; Legrenzi;
Walther and his advance in technique, experiments in
tone painting--Giov. Battista Vitali; Tommaso Vitali
and Torelli; Bassani; Veracini and others--Biber and other
Germans; English and French composers for the violin; early
publications of text-books and collections.
XII. VIOLIN COMPOSERS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 396
Corelli, Vivaldi, Albinoni--Their successors, Locatelli,
F. M. Veracini, and others; Tartini and his pupils;
pupils of Somis: Giardini and Pugnani--French violinists
and composers: Rébel, Francœur, Baptiste Anet, Senaillé
and Leclair; French contemporaries of Viotti: Pagin,
Lahoussaye, Gaviniès; Viotti--Violinists in Germany and
Austria during the eighteenth century: Pisendel, J. G.
Graun, Franz Benda; Leopold Mozart--The Mannheim school:
J. Stamitz, Cannabich and others; Dittersdorf, Wranitzky
and Schuppanzigh--Non-violinist composers: Handel, Bach,
Haydn, Mozart--Conclusion.
XIII. VIOLIN MUSIC IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 430
The perfection of the bow and of the classical
technique--The French school: Kreutzer, Rode, and
Baillot--Paganini: his predecessors, his life and fame,
his playing, and his compositions--Ludwig Spohr: his style
and his compositions; his pupils--Viennese violinists:
Franz Clement, Mayseder, Boehm, Ernst and others--The
Belgian school: De Bériot and Vieuxtemps--Other violinist
composers: Wieniawski, Molique, Joachim, Sarasate, Ole
Bull; music of the violinist-composers in general--Violin
music of the great masters.
PART V. CHAMBER MUSIC
XIV. THE BEGINNINGS OF CHAMBER MUSIC 467
The term ‘chamber music’; fifteenth-century dances; lute
music, early suites; vocal ‘chamber music’--Early
‘sonatas’: Gabrieli; Rossi; Marini; etc.--Vitali, Veracini,
Bassani and Corelli; Corelli’s pupils; Vivaldi; Bach and
Handel.
XV. THE FIRST PERIOD OF THE STRING QUARTET 486
The four-part habit of writing in instrumental
forms--Pioneers of the string quartet proper: Richter,
Boccherini and Haydn; Haydn’s early quartets--The Viennese
era of the string quartet; Haydn’s _Sonnen_ quartets; his
‘Russian’ quartets; his later quartets--W. A. Mozart;
Sammartini’s influence; Mozart’s early (Italian) quartets;
Viennese influences; Mozart’s Viennese quartets--His last
quartets and their harmonic innovations.
XVI. THE STRING QUARTET: BEETHOVEN 509
Beethoven’s approach to the string quartet; incentives; the
six quartets opus 18--The Rasumowsky quartets; _opera_
74 and 95--The great development period; the later
quartets, op. 127 _et seq._: The E-flat major (op. 127)--The
A minor (op. 132); the B-flat major (op. 130); the
C-sharp minor (op. 131); the F major (op. 135).
XVII. THE STRING ENSEMBLE SINCE BEETHOVEN 534
The general trend of development: Spohr, Cherubini,
Schubert--Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms, etc.--New
developments: César Franck, d’Indy, Chausson--The
characteristics of the Russian schools: Tschaikowsky,
Borodine, Glazounoff and others--Other national types:
Grieg, Smetana, Dvořák--The three great quartets since
Schubert and what they represent; modern quartets and the
new quartet style: Debussy, Ravel, Schönberg--Conclusion.
XVIII. THE PIANOFORTE AND OTHER INSTRUMENTS IN CHAMBER MUSIC 573
The trio--Pianoforte quartets and quintets--Sonatas for
violoncello and piano--The piano with wind
instruments--Chamber music for wind instruments by the great
composers.
ILLUSTRATIONS IN VOLUME SEVEN
‘Home Concert’ painting by Fritz von Uhde (in colors) _Frontispiece_
FACING
PAGE
The Virginal and the Gravicembalo 8
The Clavichord and the Harpsichord 8
Title page of Kuhnau’s ‘Neue Clavier-Übung’ 32
Fac-simile of Bach’s Manuscript of the Prelude in C major
(Well-Tempered Clavichord) 80
Harpsichord Composers (D. Scarlatti, Couperin, C. P. E. Bach,
Clementi) 110
Beethoven’s Broadwood Piano 156
Pianoforte Classics (Moscheles, Czerny, Hummel, Field) 182
Caricature of Johannes Brahms on His Way to
the ‘Red Porcupine’ 238
Frédéric Chopin (after painting by Ary Scheffler) 268
Anton Rubinstein’s Hand 332
Famous Pianists (d’Albert, Busoni, Gabrilowitch, Paderewski) 364
Relatives of the Violin 372
Stradivarius at Work 386
Great Violin Composers (Corelli, Vivaldi, Tartini) 398
Caricature Statuette of Paganini 438
Great Violinists (Wieniawski, Joachim, Vieuxtemps, de Bériot) 448
Modern Violinists (Sarasate, Kreisler, Ysaye, Thibaut) 464
‘The Concert’; painting by Terborch (in colors) 476
Pioneers of the String Quartet (Boccherini, Haydn, Richter
and Dittersdorf) 488
Ludwig Spohr 536
The Flonzaley Quartet 550
Great 'Cellists (Popper, Gerardi, Casals) 596
Arnold Schönberg 602
PIANOFORTE AND CHAMBER MUSIC
CHAPTER I
KEYBOARD INSTRUMENTS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF KEYBOARD TECHNIQUE
Keyboard instruments and their derivation; the clavichord
and its mechanism; the harpsichord and its relatives,
virginal, _cembalo_, etc.; technique and use of the
harpsichord--The beginnings of harpsichord music; the
Gabrielis and Merulo; early forms; the influence of
harmony and the crystallization of form--Frescobaldi and
other organist-composers for harpsichord; early English
virginal collections; John Bull, etc.--Genesis of the
suite; influence of lute-music; Froberger, Denis Gaultier,
etc.; Kuhnau--Development of the harpsichord ‘style’; great
players: Chambonnières, etc.
I
The foundations of pianoforte music were laid during the second half
of the sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth, with the
foundations of instrumental music in general. Though there were at
this time no pianofortes, there were three keyboard instruments, all
of which not only took their part in the development of instrumental
music, but more especially prepared the way for the great instrument of
their kind which was yet unborn. These were the organ, the harpsichord,
and the clavichord.
The organ was then, as now, primarily an instrument of the church,
though there were small, portable organs called _regals_, which were
often used for chamber music and even as a part of accompaniment,
together with other instruments, in the early operas. With the history
of its construction we shall not concern ourselves here (see Vol. VI,
Chap. XIV). From the middle of the fourteenth century Venice had been
famous for her organists, because the organs in St. Mark’s cathedral
were probably the best in Europe. Up to the end of the seventeenth
century they were very imperfect. Improvements were slow. Great as was
the rôle taken by the organ all over Europe, from the basilica of St.
Peter’s in Rome to the northern town of Lübeck in Germany, the action
was hard and uneven, the tuning beset with difficulties. But the organ
was the prototype of all keyboard instruments. Upon the imperfect
organs of those days composers built up the keyboard style of music.
The harpsichords and the clavichords were what one might call the
domestic substitutes for the organ. Of these the clavichord was
perhaps slightly the older instrument. Its origin is somewhat obscure,
though it is easy to see in it the union of the organ keyboard with
strings, on the principle of that ancient darling of the theorists,
the monochord, the great and undisputed ruler over intervals of
musical pitch, from the days of Pythagoras down throughout the Middle
Ages. This monochord was hardly an instrument. It was a single
string stretched over a movable bridge. By shifting the bridge the
string could be stopped off into different lengths, which gave out,
when plucked, different pitches of sound. The relative lengths of
the stopped string offered a simple mathematical basis for the
classification of musical intervals.
The clavichord worked on the same principle. At the back end of each
key lever was an upright tangent, at first of wood, later of metal,
which, when the key was depressed, sprang up against the wire string
stretched above it. The blow of this tangent caused the wire to
vibrate and produce sound; and at the same time the tangent determined
the length of the string which was to vibrate, just as the finger
determines the length of a violin string by stopping it at some point
on the fingerboard. The strings of the clavichord were so stretched
that of the two lengths into which the tangent might divide them, the
longer lay to the left. It was this longer length which was allowed
to vibrate, giving the desired pitch; the shorter length to the right
being muffled or silenced by strips of felt laid or woven across
the strings. Thus the little tangents at the back end of the keys
performed the double function of sounding the string by hitting it and
determining its pitch by stopping it. Thus, too, one string served
several keys. By the middle of the sixteenth century the normal range
was four full octaves, from C to c^3. There were many more keys than
strings, which was a serious restriction upon music for the instrument;
for notes which lay as closely together as, let us say, C-sharp and E
could not be sounded at once, since both must be played upon the same
string. Not until practically the beginning of the eighteenth century
were clavichords made with a string for each key. They were then called
_bundfrei_, in distinction from the older clavichords, which had been
called _gebunden_.
The clavichord always remained square or oblong in shape, and for
many years had no legs of its own, but was set upon a table like a
box--hence one of its old names, _Schachbrett_, chess-board. The case
was often of beautiful wood, sometimes inlaid and adorned with scrolls,
and the under side of the cover was often painted with allegorical
pictures and pious or sententious mottoes. The keys were small, the
touch extremely light. The tone, though faint, had a genuine sweetness
and an unusual warmth; and, by a trembling up and down movement of the
wrist while the finger still pressed the key, the skilled player could
give to it a palpitating quality, allied to the vibrato of the human
voice or the violin, which went by the name of _Bebung_. This lifelike
pulsing of tone was its most precious peculiarity, one which unhappily
is lacking to the pianoforte, in most ways immeasurably superior.
Hardly less prized by players who esteemed fineness of expression
above clearness and brilliance, was the responsiveness of its tone
to delicate gradations of touch. This made possible fine shading and
intimate nuances. On this account it was highly valued, especially
in Germany, as a practice instrument, upon which the student could
cultivate a discriminating sensitive touch, and by which his ear could
be trained to refinement of perception.
The tone of the clavichord was extremely delicate. Its subtle carrying
quality could not secure it a place in the rising orchestras, nor in
the concert hall. It belonged in the study, or by the fireside, and
in such intimate places was enshrined and beloved by those who had
ears for the finer whisperings of music. But not at once was it so
beloved in the course of the early development of our instrumental
music. Frail and restricted, it was but a makeshift to bring within the
circle of the family the growing music of its powerful overshadowing
prototype--the organ.
The harpsichord was quite different and shared with its weaker sister
only the keyboard and the wire strings. It was in essence a harp
or a psalter played by means of a keyboard. The strings were tuned
as in a harp and were plucked by means of quills attached to the
key-levers. The tone was sharp and dry and could not be influenced by
the player’s touch. Instruments of this nature seem first to have been
made in England. At any rate it was in England that a considerable
literature was first written for them. The English virginals are small
harpsichords. The origin of the quaint name is no longer carried
back to the love of the Virgin Queen Elizabeth for such music as
the instrument could produce. Nor is it likely that it was so named
on account of its size (it could be held on the lap), whereby it
recommended itself to the convenience of young ladies with a musical
turn. Most likely its name is due to its range, which was the high
range of a young woman’s voice, an octave higher than the centre
octave of the organ.
The harpsichord, or, more exactly, instruments which were plucked by
quills attached to key-levers, went by many names besides virginals.
In Italy it was called the _clavicembalo_, later the _gravicembalo_,
or merely _cembalo_; in France the _clavecin_; in Germany the
_Kielflügel_. The more or less general name of spinet seems to be
derived from the name of a famous Italian maker working at the
beginning of the sixteenth century, Giovanni Spineta, of Venice.
These instruments developed side by side with the clavichord but
to much greater proportions. In the course of time several strings
were strung for one note, one or all of which might be used, at the
discretion of the player, by means of stops similar in appearance and
use to organ stops. Sometimes the extra strings of a note would be
tuned at the octave or upper fifth, permitting the player to produce
the mixture effects common to the organ. Many instruments were fitted
with two and even three banks of keys, which operated upon distinct
sets of strings, or might bring some special sort of quill into play;
and these keyboards could be used independently for contrast, or
coupled for volume, or the music might be divided upon them. There were
also pedals for special effects.
There was great need of these numerous sets of strings, these various
sorts of quills, these keyboards and devices for coupling them, because
the mechanism of the harpsichord action was unsusceptible to the fine
gradations of touch. It was essentially a mechanical instrument; its
range of what we may call tone-shading was defined by the number of
purely mechanical adjuncts with which it happened to be furnished.
Variety depended upon the ingenuity of the player in bringing these
means into play. This does not, of course, imply that there was no
skill in ‘touching’ the harpsichord. The player had to practice hours
then as now, to make his touch light and, above all, regular and even.
The slightest clumsiness was perhaps even more evident to the ear of
the listener in the frosty tones of the harpsichord than it would be
today in the warmer and less distinct tone of the pianoforte. But
once this evenness and lightness attained, the science of ‘touch’ was
mastered and the player proceeded to search out musical effects in
other directions.
In the course of these years from 1500 to 1750 it was made more and
more to impress the ear by means of added strings and stops and sets
of quills, till it became the musical keystone of chamber music, of
growing orchestra and flowering opera. At the same time it was made
ever more beautiful to the eye. It grew fine in line and graceful in
shape; its wood was exquisitely finished and varnished; it was inlaid
with mother-of-pearl, and was beautifully decorated and enscrolled.
The keys were small and usually of box-wood, the diatonic keys often
black, the chromatic keys white with mother-of-pearl or ivory. Artisan
and artist lavished their skill upon it. What a centre it became! How
did it sound under the fingers of Count Corsi, behind the scenes of his
private theatre in the Palazzo Corsi at Florence, while noble men and
gentle ladies sang out the story of Orpheus and Eurydice to a great
king of France and Maria de Medici his bride, when the first Italian
opera was sung in public?
The great Monteverdi’s antique orchestra clustered about two
harpsichords, only a few years later in Mantua, when ‘Ariadne’ brought
tears to the eyes of princes. How was it in Venice when Cavalli was of
all musicians the most famous, in the public theatre of San Cassiano?
It supported the oratorios of Carissimi in Rome, and his cantatas
as well. And in 1679 the great Bernardo Pasquini, organist of the
people and the senate of Rome, presided at the harpsichord when the
new theatre of Capranica was opened, and the amiable Corelli led the
violins. And so they all presided at the harpsichord, these brilliant
writers of operas now of all music the most discarded, down to the days
of the great Scarlatti in Naples, of Handel in London, of Keiser and
Graun in Hamburg, and Hasse, the beloved Saxon, in Dresden. Lully the
iron-willed, he who watched alertly the eyebrow of great King Louis XIV
of France, sat at his harpsichord in his lair and spilled snuff on the
keys while he wrought his operas out of them. Then there was Mattheson,
who would sing Antony, and die in the part, yet would come back and
play the harpsichord in the Hamburg opera house orchestra after all the
house had seen him die. He was determined to sit at the harpsichord, in
the centre of the orchestra, and accompany his Egyptian queen to death,
when all knew he should rightfully be waiting for her in Heaven with a
lyre!
The harpsichord was indeed the centre of public music of orchestra and
opera. Even after a race of virtuosi had pulled it to the fore as a
brilliant solo instrument it still held its serviceable place in the
orchestra. When in the course of time overtures became symphonies,
it was still from the harpsichord that the conductor, usually the
composer, led the performance of them. Gluck wished to banish it from
the orchestra of the opera house; but, when Haydn came to London in
1790 and again in 1794 to lead a performance of his specially composed
symphonies, he sat at the instrument which, more than any other, had
assisted at the growth of independent instrumental music--at the
harpsichord, now slowly but surely withdrawing into the background
before the victorious pianoforte.
It is easy to pick flaws in it, now that we can thunder it to silence
with our powerful concert grands. It is natural to smile at its thin
and none too certain sounds. It is difficult to imagine that the
hottest soul of a musician-poet could warm away the chill of it.
But what a place it held, and how inextricably is it woven with the
development of nearly all the music that now seems the freest speech
of passion and imagination! What men gave service to it: Domenico
Scarlatti, François Couperin, and Rameau; great Bach and Handel; the
sons of Bach, some of them more famous once than their father; and
the child Mozart, with a dozen courts at worship of him! The music
they wrote for it has come down to us; we hear it daily in our concert
halls. Few will deny that it gains in beauty and speaks with richer
voice through our pianoforte; but they who wrote it never heard it so;
and we who hear it, hear it not as they. Even when by the efforts of
some devoted student it is brought to performance upon the instrument
which saw its birth, we cannot truly hear it as it sounded once.
We listen, as it were, to an intruder hailing from the past, whose
usurpation of our modern ears we tolerate because we are curious and
because he is winning. With the wigs and powder, the breeches and
slippers, the bows and elegancies, it has faded into the past. Its
sound is dumb and its spirit is gone.
II
The clavichord and the harpsichord were the instruments upon which
music was first shaped for the pianoforte during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Looming behind them and quite dominating them
until the last quarter of the seventeenth, until even much later in
Germany, was the organ. Instrumental music had a long road to travel
before either of the two smaller instruments received the special
attention of composers. The organ led this uncertain way, setting out
milestones which mark the successive stages in the development of
the great forms of instrumental music. Later bands of strings took
this leadership away from her. Always the clavichord and the
harpsichord followed submissively in the trail of the organ, or carried
the impedimenta for the strings, until late in the seventeenth century.
Considering the wilderness through which composers had to make their
way, their progress was rapid. In the course of the seventeenth century
they found forms and styles of music quite unknown when the march began.
[Illustration]
Top: the virginal and the gravicembalo.
Bottom: the clavicord and the harpsichord.
In the year 1600 there was no pure-blooded instrumental music. The
sets of pieces for organ, lute, or groups of instruments which had
appeared up to that time, and such sets had appeared as early as 1502,
were almost strict copies of vocal forms, in which the vocal style was
scarcely altered. Frequently they were simply arrangements of famous
madrigals and _chansons_ of the day. The reason is obvious. For well
over a century and a half, the best energy of musicians had gone into
the perfecting of unaccompanied choral music, into masses and motets
for the church, and into madrigals, the secular counterparts of the
motets. Long years of labor had amassed a truly astonishing technique
in writing this sort of music. The only art of music was the special
art of vocal polyphony. Instruments were denied a style and almost
a music of their own.[1] But improvements in sonority and mechanism
brought instruments into prominence, and the spirit of the Renaissance
stimulated composers to experiment with music for them. This was the
beginning of a new art, fraught with difficulties and problems, to meet
which composers had only the skill acquired in the old.
By far the most serious of these was the problem of form. The new music
was independent of words, and, in order to enjoy freedom from words
of any sort and at the same time to exist and to walk abroad, it had
to become articulate of itself; had, so to speak, to build a frame or
a skeleton out of its proper stuff. It had to be firmly knit and well
balanced.
The music of the masses of Palestrina, woven about a well-known text,
like that of the madrigals and _chansons_ of Arcadelt and Jannequin,
which depended upon popular love-poems, was vague and formless. Such
inner coherence as it had of itself was the result of continuous and
skillful repetition of short phrases or motives in the course of the
various voice-parts. In religious music these motives were for the
most part fragments of the plain-song chant, nearly as old as the
church itself; and masses frequently went by the name of the plain-song
formula out of which they were thus built. Over and over again these
bits of melody appeared, now in one part, now in another, the voices
imitating each other so constantly that the style has been aptly called
the imitative style. It was this style in which the great organists of
the sixteenth and early seventeenth century first shaped music for the
organ. It was the one principle of musical form upon which they knew
how to build.
Thus were constructed the _ricercars_ of the famous Andrea Gabrieli
(d. 1586), Claudio Merulo (d. 1604), and Giovanni Gabrieli (d. 1612),
the great pioneers. The name ricercar is itself significant. It came
from _ricercare_ (_rechercher_), to seek out over and over again. Such
were the pieces, a constant seeking after the fleeing fragment of a
theme. Older names, originally applied to vocal music, were _fuga_ and
_caccia_--flight and chase. Always there was the idea of pursuit. A
little motive of a few notes was announced by one part. The other parts
entered one by one upon the hunt of this leader, following, as best the
composer could make them, in its very footsteps.
There was a unity in this singleness of purpose, a very logical
coherence, so long as the leader was not lost sight of. Little
counter-themes might join in the chase and give a spice of variety
within the unity. But unhappily for the musical form of these early
works, the theme which began was run to earth long before the end of
the piece; another took its place and was off on a new trail, again to
be run down and to give way to yet a third leader. Unity and coherence
were lost, the piece ambled on without definite aim or limit. There is,
however, a piece by Giovanni Gabrieli in which the opening theme and
a definite counter-theme are adhered to throughout. This is a rather
brilliant exception, becoming as the century grows older more and more
the rule until, other principles mastered and applied, composers have
built up one of the great forms, the true _fugue_. Toward the end of
the sixteenth century the name _fantasia_ is applied to this same
incoherent form and in the seventeenth that of _capriccio_ appears.
Later, at the time of Bach, the word _ricercar_ signified a fugue
worked with unusual technical skill.[2]
The ricercar was the most important of the early instrumental forms, if
form it may be called which was at first but a style. The _canzona_,
another form at first equally favored by composers, was destined to
have but little effect upon the development of keyboard music. There
was no real principle of construction underlying it. It was merely
the instrumental counterpart of the famous French _chansons_ of the
day. These were part-songs divided into several contrasting sections
according to the stanzas of the poems to which they were set. Some of
the sections were in simple chord style, like hymns of the present day;
others in more or less elaborate polyphonic style. The instrumental
_canzona_ followed the same plan. The sections were irregular in
length, in number and in metre; and the piece as a whole lacked unity
and balance. After the middle of the seventeenth century it was
generally abandoned by organists. Other composers, however, took it
up, and by regulating the length and number of the various sections,
by expanding them, and, finally, by bringing each to a definite close,
laid the foundations for the famous Italian _sonata da chiesa_, cousin
germain to the better known Suite.
Other names appear in the old collections, such as Toccata and Prelude,
which even today have more or less vague meaning and then were vaguer
still. Toccata was at first a general name for any keyboard music. All
instrumental music was originally _sonata_ (from _sonare_, to sound),
in distinction from _cantata_ (from _cantare_, to sing); and from
_sonata_ keyboard music was specially distinguished by the appellation
_toccata_ (from _toccare_, to touch). When a characteristic keyboard
style had at last worked itself free of the old vocal style, the word
toccata signified a piece of music which need have no particular form
but must display the particular brilliance of the new style.
The Prelude, too, was at first equally free of the limits of form. As
the name plainly tells, it was a short bit of music preparatory to
the greater piece to come. Not long ago it was still the fashion for
concert pianists to preludize before beginning their programs, running
scales and arpeggios over an improvised series of harmonies. The old
preludes were essentially the same, very seriously limited, of course,
by the childish condition of instrumental technique, and more or less
aimless because harmonies were then undefined and unstable. Toward the
middle of the seventeenth century organists built up definite schemes,
if not forms, of preludizing before the singing of chorales in the
Lutheran Church; but this art was naturally restricted to the organ.
Preludes for the harpsichord and clavichord took on definite form only
when the relatively modern system of major and minor keys had grown up
out of the ruin of the ancient system of ecclesiastical modes.
Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that all forms of instrumental
music had to attend the definite shaping and establishment of the
harmonic idea of music. This was a slow process, and nearly all
instrumental music written before 1650, no matter how skillfully the
thematic material is woven, lacks to our ears logical form, because of
the vagueness or the monotony of its harmony. The system of harmony
upon which our great instrumental music rests is so clear and familiar
that it is hard for us to imagine another art of music in which it did
not constitute a groundwork, in the structure of which, indeed, it held
no firm place. Yet in the magnificent vocal music in the style of which
Palestrina has left imperishable models, harmony, as we understand
it today, did not enter. He and his great predecessors were guided
seldom, it is easy to say they were guided not at all, by the beauties
of chord progressions. They did not aim at modulations. Rather, by
the rules of the art of their day, modulation was forbidden them. No
composer might lead his music out of the _mode_ in which it began,
to bewilder his hearer in a vague ecstasy of unrest, later to soothe
him, gently shifting the harmonies back again home. Before his mind
was the ideal of weaving many voice-parts, and to his pen the skill of
countless imitations and independent melodies. The beauty of consonance
after dissonance could not be appreciated by him, since to him each
dissonance was a blemish. His was a music of flowing concord. Such
harmonic discord as was inevitable was so smoothly prepared, so gently
touched, that it now passes all but unobserved. This was essentially
religious music.
Many causes brought about the awakening of musicians to the beauty of
harmony and its expressive power. The most effectual was the growing
opera. The aim of the first writers of opera was the combination of
dramatic recitation and music, from the union of which they shaped
a style of music we now call _recitative_. The singing or reciting
voice was accompanied by a few scattered chords upon the harpsichord,
these chords serving at first mainly to mark cadences, later little by
little to intensify the emotion of the play. It was then but a step
to dramatic effects of harmony, to harsh, unprepared discords. The
player at the harpsichord, always the nucleus about which the operatic
orchestra grouped itself, began to appreciate chords as a power in
music. The organist, under the influence of the dramatic style, thought
of chords now and then in his slow-moving ricercars. The modes were
broken down. A new system of scales, our own, grew up, which was
adaptable to the new need of composers, to the sequence and contrast
of chords. Harmony grew into music, became more than themes, than
imitation and pursuit, the balance of its form.
Until music had thus knit itself anew upon harmony, it was
fundamentally unstable. Toccatas, ricercars, canzonas, preludes, even
fugues, all wandered unevenly, without proper aim, until harmony
came to lay the contrast and balance of chords and keys as the great
principle of form. Especially was instrumental music dependent upon
this logical principle, for, as we have noted, music without words
stands in vital need of self-sufficing form, and without it totters and
falls in scattered pieces.
The best skill at knitting themes together was of no avail without
harmony. It left but a texture of music flapping to the caprice of
the wind of invention. Or, to change the figure, composers laid block
by block along the ground; but, without harmony, had not the art to
build them up one upon the other into lasting temples. And so the music
of the Gabrielis, of Merulo, and of many another man from many a wide
corner of Europe lies hidden in the past. It is tentative, not perfect.
And the music of later and perhaps greater men lies similarly hidden.
III
The construction of instrumental music on the basis of one central
key with excursions or modulations into other keys for the sake of
development and variety began to be understood about the middle of
the seventeenth century. A very noticeable advance in this direction
shows in the music of Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1644), one of the
most brilliant organists before the time of Bach. Much of his music
has an archaic sound to our ears. He is by no means wholly free of the
old modal restrictions. But he stands as one of the pioneers in the
relatively new art of organ music--a bold innovator, guided by the
unerring taste of a great artist.
A romantic glory is about his name. As a player he was probably
unmatched in his day, and his fame was widespread. It is said that
when he played in St. Peter’s at Rome, where for many years he held
the position of organist, the vast cathedral was filled with people
come to hear him. One of the great masters of the next generation, the
German Froberger, was granted four years of absence from his duties
at the court of Vienna, that he might go to study with Frescobaldi in
Rome. His compositions were published in several sets, which included
ricercars, toccatas, preludes, canzonas, capriccios, and so forth. All
these, not excepting even the preludes, are in the contrapuntal style
which is the outgrowth of the old vocal polyphony. But they are greatly
enlivened by rapid figures, scales and arpeggios as well as trills and
ornamental devices. Such figures, being not at all suitable to voices
but only to a keyboard instrument, mark the progress of the keyboard
style toward a distinct individuality if not independence from the
ancient past of vocal masses and motets, an independence which no great
music has ever quite achieved.
All these sets of pieces were written in good faith for the harpsichord
as well as for the organ. But in reality, except in so far as certain
principles of form are valuable to all music, and a few figures of
musical ornamentation are common to all keyboard music, harpsichord
music profits but vicariously from Frescobaldi. His music is
essentially organ music, and the development it marks as accomplished,
and that toward which it points, are proper to the organ and not to
the harpsichord. To the one instrument breadth and power are fitting,
to the other lightness and fleetness. Inasmuch as the same distinction
exists between the organ and the pianoforte at the present day, with
some allowances made for improvements in the mechanism of the organ and
for the great sonority of the pianoforte, which allowances affect only
the degree but not the kind of differences, Frescobaldi can be said to
have influenced the development of pianoforte music only by what he
contributed toward the solution of very general problems of form and
structure.
The same must be said of many other great organists of his and of later
days, such as Zweelinck, Samuel Scheidt, Buxtehude, Bohm, Pachelbel,
and others. It may be noted that after the death of Frescobaldi the art
of organ-playing passed from Italy, the land of its birth and first
considerable growth, to Germany. Here a great line of virtuosi added
more and more to the splendor and dignity of organ music, perfecting
and embellishing style, inventing new forms and making them firm. They
remained loyal to the polyphonic style, partly because this is almost
essentially proper to the organ with its unlimited power to sustain
tone; partly because it is the impressive and noble style of music most
in keeping with the spirit of the church, from which the organ will
apparently never be wholly dissociated.[3]
It cannot be said that this style is in any measure so fitting to the
harpsichord and the clavichord or to the pianoforte. For these, a
markedly different sort of polyphony has been devised. But so long as
organists alone walked in music with the power of assurance--and they
were well in command of the problems of their special art while other
instrumentalists and writers of operas were floundering about--so long
did their influence keep instrumental music in sway.
How, then, did the great organists of the sixteenth and the seventeenth
century affect the growth of pianoforte music? By establishing certain
forms, notably the fugue, which have been adapted to every kind of
serious instrumental music and to the pianoforte with only less
propriety than to the organ; by helping to lay the harmonic foundation
of music which, as we have said, is the basis for all music down to
the present day and is but now being forsaken; by discovering the
effectiveness of certain styles of ornamentation and runs which are
essentially common to all keyboard instruments. They helped to give
music a form made of its own stuff, and a beauty and permanence which
is the result of such form perfected. In their workshops two of such
forms were rough-hewn which proved of later service to pianoforte
music--the harmonic prelude and the fugue.
We must look elsewhere for the development of other forms, less perfect
perhaps, but no less important in the history of pianoforte music. Such
are the rondo and the variation form. The rondo may be mentioned here
because of its great antiquity. Like the ballade, it was originally a
dance song, really a song with a burden and varying couplets. No form
could be simpler. The burden recurring regularly gives an impression of
unity, which, only in case of too many recurrences, has the fault of
monotony. The varying couplets, constituting the episodes between the
reiterations of the burden or main theme, offer variety and contrast.
Yet, in spite of the merits of this scheme of musical structure,
the form was little used by composers down to the beginning of the
eighteenth century. Relatively long pieces of music, in which the rondo
form could be used, were generally written in the style of fugues.
Furthermore, until the harmonic art was developed and the contrast of
keys appreciated, the episodes, being restricted by the old modal laws
to the tonality of the main theme, would be in a great measure without
the virtue of contrast.
The variation form, on the other hand, was greatly used, conspicuously
so by a number of writers for the virginal in England, whose works,
surviving in several ancient collections, form a unique and practically
isolated monument in the history of pianoforte music. These collections
have often been described in detail and carefully analyzed. The most
comprehensive is that long known as the Queen Elizabeth Virginal Book,
now called merely the Fitzwilliam Collection, a beautifully worked
manuscript preserved in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge. Others are
Benjamin Cosyn’s Virginal Book and Will Foster’s, both of which are at
Buckingham Palace; a smaller book, known as Lady Nevile’s Book, and the
_Parthenia_, famous as the first collection of virginal music printed
in England.
The _Parthenia_ was printed in 1611. But an old manuscript collection,
the Mulliner Collection, contains music that can hardly be later
than 1565. The activity of the English composers, therefore, during
the years between 1565 and 1611 produced an extraordinary amount of
music designed expressly for the virginal or harpsichord. Among the
composers three stand out prominently: John Bull, William Byrd, and
Orlando Gibbons; Byrd by reason of his fine artistic sense, Bull by
his instinct for instrumental effect. Indeed, Bull, though a great
organist, was a virtuoso for the harpsichord quite as remarkable in a
limited sphere as Liszt was to be in a much broader one. In much of his
virginal music there is a variety of figuration far more in keeping
with the peculiar nature of the instrument for which it was written
than that which is to be found in the work of his successors of any
land, nearly to the time of Domenico Scarlatti.
Of all forms of musical structure, the most frequently employed in
the works which make up these collections is the variation form. It
is to be understood, of course, that these variations are not the
variations of Bach, of Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms. These great
masters subjected their chosen themes to the influences of diverse
moods, as it were, from which the themes took on new rhythm, new form,
even new harmony. They were born with a great instrumental technique to
hand, from which to select a thousand devices wherewith to adorn and
color their themes. Byrd, Bull, and Gibbons, for all their conspicuous
genius, could not expand to great proportion the art of writing for
domestic keyboard instruments. It was still in a weak infancy. Nor was
the emotional power of music at all appreciated at that time, nor the
treatment of the same theme as the expression of various emotions in
turn likely to occur to the mind of the most gifted of musicians.
The variation form, then, was merely a means to spin out a piece of
considerable length, which should yet have consistency and coherence.
The theme itself was scarcely if at all altered in its various
repetitions, but went on over and over again, while the composer added
above it an ever more complicated or a more animated counterpoint.
The counterpoint was for the most part conjunct; that is to say, that
it progressed by short steps, not by skips. Scales are therefore far
more frequent than arpeggios. The shade of the old vocal art is deep
even over these composers. John Bull alone is, as we have said, at
times astonishingly modern. His brilliant imagination devised arpeggio
figures which today have by no means lost their effectiveness, and
he could split up the theme itself into a series of lively, skipping
figures.
Any theme, from the ancient plain-song or from the treasure of
folk-music, was suitable to serve as a ‘ground’ to these variations,
or divisions, as they were called. One comes across delightful old
dance-tunes and songs popular in that day. These in themselves are full
of the charm of English melody, but when harnessed, as it were, to
the slow-moving counterpoint of the variation style, with its archaic
harmony and lifeless rhythm, they are robbed of their spirit and their
life. We have saved to us again a dead music.
Most lifeless of all, and almost laughably pompous in their rigor,
are the variations on the first six notes of the scale, the so-called
_Fantasias on ut re mi fa sol la_. Every composer tried a hand at this
sort of composition. The six notes usually marched up and down the
scale, with no intermission. A great deal of modulation was attempted.
Sometimes the formula was gone through upon the successive notes of
the scale. It was set upon its way in various rhythms, sometimes in
long, steady notes, again in rapid notes, yet again in dotted rhythms.
At the best the result was a display of some cleverness on the part of
the composer, a bit of daring in chromatic alterations, some novelty in
combinations of rhythms. It can hardly be supposed that they expressed
any æsthetic aspiration. They stand in relation to the development of
pianoforte music only as technical exercises of a sort.
The same may be said in some instances of the variations upon songs,
but is not in the main true. Here is distinctly a groping toward
beauty, largely in the dark, to be sure, but tending, on the one hand,
toward the development of a fitness of style and, on the other, of a
broad and varied form, the noble possibilities of which have become
manifest through the genius of all the great instrumental composers
since the time of Bach.
The influence of these gifted Englishmen and their extraordinary work
upon the development of harpsichord music in general was probably
relatively slight. A piece by Sweelinck, the famous Dutch organist,
is in the Fitzwilliam collection; a fact which points to the intimacy
between Holland and England in matters musical. The presence of
famous English organists in Holland throughout the first half of the
seventeenth century points in the same direction. But the course of
harpsichord music in Holland and Germany was, down to the time of
Emanuel Bach, guided by organ music. Inasmuch as perhaps the most
remarkable feature of this English virginal music is the occasional
flashes of instrumental skill and of intuition for harpsichordal
effects from the pen of John Bull, and as these stirred to no emulation
in Germany, the effect of the English virginal music as such upon the
history of the special art may be set down as practically negligible.
The famous collections endure, quite like Purcell’s music a whole
century later, as an isolated monument of a sudden national development.
The toccata, prelude, fugue, and variations are the results of the
labor of musicians during the sixteenth and the first half of the
seventeenth centuries to invent and improve forms of music which, as
independent compositions, might impress the hearer with their organic
unity, so to speak, and serve as dignified expression of their own
skill and their own ideals of beauty. Of these the prelude alone, with
its basis of chord sequences, is wholly a product of the new time. The
others rest heavily upon the vocal skill of the past. None of them,
however, is perfect. Skill in laying a harmonic groundwork of wide
proportions is still to be acquired; and, so far as the harpsichord and
clavichord are concerned, a sense for instrumental style and special
instrumental effects has to be cultivated much further. We shall have
to wait another half-century before that sense has become keen enough
to influence development of harpsichord music.
IV
Meanwhile the growth and relative perfection of another form is to
be observed, namely, the suite.[4] This is a conventional group of
four short pieces in dance forms and rhythms. A great amount of dance
music had been published for the lute in Italy as early as 1502. Of
the twenty-one pieces published in the _Parthenia_ more than a hundred
years later, five were pavans and ten were galliards. In all these
early dance pieces the rhythm is more or less disguised under a heavy
polyphonic style; so we may presume that they were not intended to be
played in the ballroom, but rather that the short and symmetrical forms
of good dance music were regarded by composers as serviceable molds
into which to cast their musical inspirations. Indeed, they must have
made a strong appeal to composers at a time when they were baffled in
their instrumental music by ignorance of the elementary principles of
musical structure.
The early Italian lute collections already reveal a tendency on the
part of composers to group at least two of these dances together. The
two chosen are the pavan and the galliard, the one a slow and stately
dance in double time, the other a livelier dance in triple time.
Often, it is true, these two are not grouped together in the printed
collections; but it seems likely that the lutenists of the sixteenth
century were fond of such a selection in performance. In 1597 Thomas
Morley, an English musician, published in the form of dialogues his
‘Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke.’ In this he
treated of dance music at some length, and made special note of the
pleasing effect to be got by alternating pavans and galliards.
This group of two pieces is the nucleus about which the suite developed
during the first half of the seventeenth century. The several steps in
its growth are rather obscure; and, as they are to be observed more in
music for groups of strings than in harpsichord music, it will serve
us merely to mention them. The pavan and the galliard gave way early
to the _allemande_ and the _courante_. The origin of the former is
doubtful. There were two kinds of courantes--one evidently native to
France, the other to Italy. Both were in triple time, but were in many
other ways clearly differentiated. To the allemande and courante was
later added a slow dance from Spain--the _sarabande_; and before the
middle of the century the _gigue_, or _giga_, from Italy, made secure
its place as the last of the standard group of four. These four pieces
so combined were invariably in the same key. Apart from this they had
no relationship.[5] The tie which held them together was wholly one of
convention.
Such is the stereotype of the suite when it becomes firmly established
in music for the harpsichord, as we find it in the works of the
German J. J. Froberger. Froberger died in 1667, but his suites for
harpsichord, twenty-eight in all, were written earlier; some in 1649,
others in 1656, according to autograph copies. He had been a wanderer
over the face of Europe. After studying with Frescobaldi in Rome he had
spent some years in Paris, where he had come into contact with French
composers for the harpsichord, whose work we shall discuss later on.
Thence he had gone to London, where his skill in playing the organ
and harpsichord seems to have lifted him from the mean position of
pumping air into the organ at Westminster (he had been robbed on his
journey and had reached London friendless and poverty-stricken) to that
of court favorite. Later he returned to Europe, evidently pursued by
ill luck, and he died at Héricourt, near Montbelliard, at the home of
Sibylla, Duchess of Würtemberg, a pupil who had offered him refuge.
By far the majority of his suites for the harpsichord, and be it noted
they are for harpsichord and not for organ, are in the orthodox order
of _Allemande_, _Courante_, _Sarabande_, and _Gigue_. The dances are
all constructed upon the same plan, a plan at the basis of which the
new idea of harmony has at last been solidly established. Each piece
is divided neatly into two sections of about equal length, each of
which is repeated. The harmonic groundwork is simple and clear. The
dance opens in the tonic key. If the piece is major it modulates to the
dominant, if minor to the relative major; and in that key the first
section ends. This section having been repeated, the second section
begins in the key in which the first section left off, and modulates
back again, usually through one or two keys, to end in the tonic. The
whole makes a compact little piece, very neatly balanced. It would seem
to be quite sealed in perfection and to contain no possibilities of new
growth; but the short passages of free modulation through which the
second section pursues its way from dominant or relative major back to
tonic contained germs of harmonic unrest which were to swell the whole
to proportions undreamed of.
The change from tonic to dominant and back, with the few timid
modulations in the second section, offered practically all the contrast
and variety there was within the limits of a single piece. Except in
the _sarabande_, the musical texture was woven in a flowing style. The
effect is one of constant motion. A figure, not a theme, predominated.
The opening figure, it is true, was modified, often gave way to quite a
different figure in the dominant key; but the style remained always the
same, and there was but the slightest suggestion of contrast in the way
one figure glided into another.
In the suite as a whole, the uniformity of key which ruled over all
four movements precluded in the main all contrast but the contrast of
rhythm. Yet a few peculiarities of style became associated with each
of the dances and thus gave more than rhythmical variety to the whole.
The counterpoint of the allemande, for example, was more open and more
dignified, so to speak, than that of the fleet, sparkling Italian
courante. In the French courante a counterpoint of dotted quarters and
eighths prevailed, and a shifting between 6/4 and 3/2 rhythm stamped
the movement with a rhythmic complexity not at all present in the
other movements. The second section of the gigue was almost invariably
built upon an inversion of the figures of the first section, and the
solid chord style of the sarabande not only contrasted radically with
the style of allemande, courante, and gigue, but, moreover, beguiled
composers into the expression of personal emotion now noble, now
tender, which put sarabandes in general in a class by themselves amid
the music of that time.
Though the normal suite was constituted of these four dances in the
order we have named, other dances came to find a place therein. Of
these the favorites were _gavottes_, _minuets_, _bourrées_, _loures_,
_passepieds_, and others; and they were inserted in any variety or
sequence between the sarabande and the gigue. Sometimes in place of
extra dances, or among them, is to be found an _air_ or _aria_, the
salient quality of which is not rhythm, but melody, usually highly
ornamented in the style made universally welcome by the Italian opera.
More rarely the air was simple and was followed by several variations.
The best known of these airs and variations which were incorporated
into suites is probably Handel’s famous set upon a melody, not his own,
which has long gone by the name of ‘The Harmonious Blacksmith.’ By the
beginning of the eighteenth century many composers were accustomed to
begin their suites with a prelude, usually in harmonic style.
In the music of the great French lutenists and clavecinists of the
seventeenth century the suite never crystallized into a stereotyped
sequence. The principle of setting together several short pieces in
the same key was none the less clearly at work, though nothing but
the fancy of the composer seems to have limited the number of pieces
which might be so united. On the other hand, the idea of emphasizing
rhythm as the chief element of contrast within the suite was often
secondary to the idea of contrasting mood. How much of this contrast
of mood was actually effective it is hard to say, but the great number
of little pieces composed either for lute or clavecin in France of the
seventeenth century, were given picturesque or fanciful names by their
composers.
This custom was firmly established by the great lutenist, Denis
Gaultier, whose collection of pieces, _La rhétorique des dieux_,
comprises some of the most exquisite and most beautifully worked music
of the century. The pieces in the collection are grouped together by
modes; but the modes by this time have become keys, and differ from
each other in little except pitch. The greater part of the pieces are
given names, borrowed for the most part from Greek mythology. _Phaèton
foudroyé_, and _Juno, ou la jalouse_ are indicative of the general tone
of them.
Close upon Gaultier’s pieces for lute came the harpsichord pieces of
Jacques Champion, son of a family of organists, who took upon himself
the name of Chambonnières. Two books of his pieces were published
in 1670. Here again the pieces are grouped in keys, in, however, no
definite number; and, though most have still only dance names to
distinguish them, many are labelled with a title.
In spite of these titles, the tendency to call upon an external idea
to aid in the construction of a piece of music is not evident in this
early harpsichord music. There is little attempt at picture drawing
in music. The names are at the most suggestive of a mood, indicative
of the humor which in the composer gave birth to the music, hints to
the listener upon the humor in which he was to take it. The structure
of the music is independent of the titles, and is of a piece with
the structure of the dance tunes which make up the German suite. The
influence of this music was not important upon the growth of form, but
upon the molding and refinement of style.
To be sure, a tendency toward realistic music crops out from time to
time all through the seventeenth century. The twitter of birds no less
than the roar of battle was attempted by many a composer, resulting,
in the case of the latter especially, in hardly more than laughably
childish imitations. Further than this composers did not often go
until, just before Bach entered upon his professional career, J. F.
Kuhnau, of Leipzig, published his extraordinary Biblical sonatas.
Besides these, the ‘Rhetoric of Gods,’ the ‘Hundred Varieties of
Musical Fruit,’ the ‘jealous ladies’ and the ‘rare ladies,’ even the
battles and the gossips, all of which have been imitated in music,
appear conventional and absolute. Here is narrative in music and a
flimsiness of structure which is meaningless without a program. There
are six of these strange compositions, upon the stories of David
and Goliath, of David and Saul, of Jacob and Leah, and others. Some
years later they undoubtedly suggested to Sebastian Bach the delicate
little capriccio which he wrote upon the departure of his brother
for the wars. Apart from this they are of slight importance except
as indications of the experimental frame of mind of their composer.
Indeed, beyond imitation and to a small extent description, neither
harpsichord nor pianoforte music has been able to make much progress in
the direction of program music.
Kuhnau’s musical narratives were published in August, 1700. Earlier
than this he had published his famous _Sonata aus dem B_. The work so
named was appended to Kuhnau’s second series of suites or _Partien_.
It has little to recommend it to posterity save its name, which here
appears in the history of clavier music for the first time. Nor does
this name designate a form of music akin to the sonatas of the age
of Mozart and Beethoven, a form most particularly associated with
the pianoforte. Kuhnau merely appropriated it from music for string
instruments. There it stood in the main for a work which was made up of
several movements like the suite, but which differed from the suite in
depending less upon rhythm and in having a style more dignified than
that which had grown out of experiments with dance tunes. In addition,
the various movements which constituted a sonata were not necessarily
in the same key. Here alone it possessed a possible advantage over the
suite. Yet though in other respects it cannot compare favorably to our
ears with the suite, Kuhnau cherished the dignity of style and name
with which tradition had endowed it. These he attempted to bestow upon
music for the clavier.[6]
The various movements lack definite form and balance. The first is in
rather heavy chord style, the chords being supported by a dignified
counterpoint in eighth notes. This leads without pause into a fugue
on a figure of lively sixteenth notes. The key is B-flat major. There
follows a short adagio in E-flat major, modulating to end in C minor,
in which key the last movement, a short allegro in triple time, is
taken up. The whole is rounded off by a return to the opening movement,
signified by the sign _Da Capo_.
Evidently pleased with this innovation, Kuhnau published in 1696 a set
of seven more sonatas called _Frische Clavier Früchte_. These show no
advance over the _Sonata aus dem B_ in mastery of musical structure.
Still they are evidence of the efforts of one man among many to give
clavier music a life of its own and to bring it in seriousness and
dignity into line with the best instrumental music of the day, namely,
with the works of such men as Corelli, Purcell, and Vivaldi. That he
was unable to do this the verdict of future years seems to show. The
attempt was none the less genuine and influential.
In the matter of structure, then, the seventeenth century worked out
and tested but a few principles which were to serve as foundation
for the masterpieces of keyboard music in the years to come. But
these, though few, were of vast importance. Chief among them was the
new principle of harmony. This we now, in the year 1700, find at
the basis of fugue, of prelude and toccata, and of dance form, not
always perfectly grasped but always in evidence. Musical form now and
henceforth is founded upon the relation and contrast of keys.
Consistently to hold to one thematic subject throughout a piece in
polyphonic style, skillfully to contrast or weave with that secondary
subjects, mark another stage of development passed. The fugue is the
result, now articulate, though awaiting its final glory from the hand
of J. S. Bach. To write little dance pieces in neat and precise form
is an art likewise well mastered; and to combine several of these,
written in the same key, in an order which, by affording contrast of
rhythms, can stir the listener’s interest and hold his attention, is
the established rule for the first of the so-called cyclic forms,
prototype of the symphony and sonata of later days. Such were the great
accomplishments of the musicians of the seventeenth century in the
matter of form.
V
In the matter of style, likewise, much was accomplished. We have had
occasion frequently to point out that in the main the harpsichord
remained throughout the first half of the seventeenth century under
the influence of the organ. For this instrument a conjunct or _legato_
style has proved to be most fitting. Sudden wide stretches, capricious
leaps, and detached runs seldom find a place in the texture of great
organ music. The organist strives for a smoothness of style compatible
with the dignity of the instrument, and this smoothness may be taken as
corollary to the fundamental relationship between organ music and the
vocal polyphony of the sixteenth century.
On the other hand, by comparison with the vocal style, the organ style
is free. Where the composer of masses was restricted by the limited
ability of the human voice to sing wide intervals accurately, the
organist was limited only by the span of the hand. Where Palestrina
could count only upon the ear of his singers to assure accurate
intonation, the organist wrote for a keyboard which, supposing the
organ to be in tune, was a mechanism that of itself could not go
wrong. Given, as it were, a physical guarantee of accuracy as a basis
for experiment, the organist was free to devise effects of sheer
speed or velocity of which voices would be utterly incapable. He had
a huge gamut of sounds equally at his command, a power that could be
mechanically bridled or let loose. His instrument could not be fatigued
while boys could be hired to pump the bellows. So long as his finger
held down a key, or his foot a pedal, so long would the answering note
resound, diminishing, increasing, increasing, diminishing, according to
his desire, never exhausted.
Therefore we find in organ music, rapid scales, arpeggios rising
from depths, falling from heights, new figures especially suited to
the organ, such as the ‘rocking’ figure upon which Bach built his
well-known organ fugue in D minor; deep pedal notes, which endure
immutably while above them the artist builds a castle of sounds;
interlinked chords marching up and down the keyboard, strong with
dissonance. There are trills and ornamental turns, rapid thirds and
sixths. And in all these things organ music displays what is its own,
not what it has inherited from choral music.
Yet, notwithstanding the magnificent chord passages so in keeping with
the spirit of the instrument, in which only the beauty of harmonic
sequence is considered, the treatment of musical material by the
organists is prevailingly polyphonic. The sound of a given piece is
the sound of many quasi-independent parts moving along together, in
which definite phrases or motives constantly reappear. The harmony
on which the whole rests is not supplied by an accompaniment, but by
the movement of the several voice-parts themselves in their appointed
courses. And it may be said as a generality that these parts progress
by steps not wider than that distance the hand can stretch upon the
keyboard.
During the first half of the seventeenth century the harpsichord was
but the echo of the organ. Even the collections of early English
virginal music, which in some ways seem to offer a brilliant exception,
are the work of men who as instrumentalists were primarily organists.
In so far as they achieved an instrumental style at all it was usually
a style fitting to a small organ. The few cases where John Bull’s
cleverness displayed itself in almost a true virtuoso style are
exceptions which prove the rule. Not until the time of Chambonnières
and Froberger do we enter upon a second stage.
About the middle of the seventeenth century Chambonnières was famous
over Europe as a performer upon the harpsichord. As first clavicinist
at the court of France, his manner of playing may be taken to represent
the standard of excellence at that time. Constantine Huygens, a Dutch
amateur exceedingly well-known in his day, mentions him many times in
his letters with unqualified admiration, always as a player of the
harpsichord, or as a composer for that instrument. Whatever skill he
may have had as an organist did not contribute to his fame; and his two
sets of pieces for harpsichord, published after his death in 1670, show
the beginnings of a distinct differentiation between harpsichord and
organ style.
[Illustration]
Title page of Kuhnan's "Neue Clavier-Übung".
The harpsichord possesses in common with the organ its keyboard or
keyboards, which render the playing of solid chords possible. The
lighter action of the harpsichord gives it the advantage over the
organ in the playing of rapid passages, particularly of those light
ornamental figures used as graces or embellishments, such as trills,
mordents, and turns. A further comparison with the organ, however,
reveals in the harpsichord only negative qualities. It has no volume
of sound, no power to sustain tones, no deep pedal notes.
Consequently the smooth polyphonic style which sounds rich and flowing
on the organ, sounds dry and thin upon the weaker instrument. The
composer who would utilize to advantage what little sonority there is
in the harpsichord must be free to scatter notes here and there which
have no name or place in the logic of polyphony, but which make his
music sound well. Voice parts must be interrupted, notes taken from
nowhere and added to chords. The polyphonic web becomes disrupted, but
the harpsichord profits by the change. It is Chambonnières who probably
first wrote in such a style for the harpsichord.
He learned little of it from what had been written for the organ, but
much from music for the lute, which, quite as late as the middle of the
century, was interchangeable with the harpsichord in accompaniments,
and was held to be equal if not superior as a solo instrument. It was
vastly more difficult to play, and largely for this reason fell into
disuse. The harpsichord is by nature far nearer akin to it than to
the organ. The free style which lutenists were driven to invent by
the almost insuperable difficulties of their instrument, is nearly as
suitable to the harpsichord as it is to the lute. Without doubt the
little pieces of Denis Gaultier were played upon the harpsichord by
many an amateur who had not been able to master the lute. The skilled
lutenist would find little to give him pause in the harpsichord
music of Chambonnières. The quality of tone of both instruments is
very similar. For neither is the strict polyphony of organ music
appropriate; for the lute it is impossible. Therefore it fell to the
lutenists first to invent the peculiar instrumental style in which
lie the germs of the pianoforte style; and to point to their cousins,
players of the harpsichord, the way towards independence from organ
music.
Froberger came under the influence of Denis Gaultier and Chambonnières
during the years he spent in Paris, and he adopted their style and
made it his own. He wrote, it is true, several sets of ricercars,
capriccios, canzonas, etc., for organ or harpsichord, and in these
the strict polyphonic style prevails, according to the conventionally
more serious nature of the compositions. But his fame rests upon the
twenty-eight suites and fragments of suites which he wrote expressly
for the harpsichord. These are closely akin to lute music, and from
the point of view of style are quite as effective as the music of
Chambonnières. In harmony they are surprisingly rich. Be it noted, too,
in passing, that they are not lacking in emotional warmth. Here is
perhaps the first harpsichord music which demands beyond the player’s
nimble fingers his quick sympathy and imagination--qualities which
charmed in Froberger’s own playing.
Kuhnau as a stylist is far less interesting than Froberger, upon whose
style, however, his clavier suites are founded. His importance rests
in the attempts he made to adapt the sonata to the clavier, in his
experiments with descriptive music, and in the influence he had upon
his contemporaries and predecessors, notably Bach and Handel. Froberger
is the real founder of pianoforte music in Germany, and beyond him
there is but slight advance either in style or matter until the time of
Sebastian Bach.
What we may now call the harpsichord style, as exemplified in the
suites of Chambonnières and Froberger, is relatively free. Both
composers had a fondness for writing in four parts, but these parts
are not related to each other, nor woven together unbrokenly as in the
polyphonic style of the organ. They cannot often be clearly followed
throughout a given piece. The upper voice carries the music along, the
others accompany. The arrangement is not wholly an inheritance from the
lute, but is in keeping with the general tendency in all music, even
at times in organ music, toward the monodic style, of which the growing
opera daily set the model.
But the harpsichord style of this time is by no means a simple system
of melody and accompaniment. Though the three voice parts which support
the fourth dwell together often in chords, they are not without
considerable independent movement. They constitute the harmonic
background, as it were, which, though serving as background, does not
lack animation and character in itself. In other words, we have a
contrapuntal, not a polyphonic, style.
A marked feature of the music is the profuse number of graces and
embellishments. These rapid little figures may be akin to the vocal
embellishments which even at the beginning of the seventeenth century
were discussed in theoretical books; but they seem to flower from
the very nature of the harpsichord, the light tone and action of
which made them at once desirable and possible. They are but vaguely
indicated in the manuscripts, and there can be no certainty as to what
was the composer’s intention or his manner of performance. Doubtless
they were left to the discretion of the player. At any rate for a
century more the player took upon himself the liberty of ornamenting
any composer’s music to suit his own whim. These _agrémens_[7] were
held to be and doubtless were of great importance. Kuhnau, in the
preface to his _Frische Clavier Früchte_, speaks of them as the sugar
to sweeten the fruit, even though he left them much to the taste of
players; and Emanuel Bach in the second half of the eighteenth century
devoted a large part of his famous book on playing the clavier to an
analysis and minute explanation of the host of them that had by then
become stereotyped. They have not, however, come down into pianoforte
music. It is questionable if they can be reproduced on the pianoforte,
the heavy tone of which obscures the delicacy which was their charm.
They must ever present difficulty to the pianist who attempts to make
harpsichord music sound again on the instrument which has inherited it.
The freedom from polyphonic restraint, inherited from the lute, and
the profusion of graces which have sprouted from the nature of the
harpsichord, mark the diversion between music for the harpsichord
and music for the organ. In other respects they are still much the
same; that is to say, the texture of harpsichord music is still
close--restricted by the span of the hand. This is not necessarily
a sign of dependence on the organ, but points rather to the young
condition of the art. It is not to be expected that the full
possibilities of an instrument will be revealed to the first composers
who write for it expressly. They lie hidden along the way which time
has to travel. But Chambonnières, in France, and Froberger, in Germany,
opened up the special road for harpsichord music, took the first step
which others had but to follow.
Neither in France nor in Germany did the next generation penetrate
beyond. Le Gallois, a contemporary of Chambonnières, has remarked that
of the great player’s pupils only one, Hardelle, was able to approach
his master’s skill. Among those who carried on his style, however,
must be mentioned d’Anglebert,[8] Le Begue,[9] and Louis and François
Couperin, relatives of the great Couperin to come.
In Germany Georg and Gottlieb Muffat stand nearly alone with Kuhnau
in the progress of harpsichord music between Froberger and Sebastian
Bach. Georg Muffat spent six years in Paris and came under French
influence as Froberger had come, but his chief keyboard works
(_Apparatus Musico Organisticus_ (1690)) are twelve toccatas more
suited to organ than to harpsichord. In 1727 his son Gottlieb had
printed in Vienna _Componimenti musicali per il cembalo_, which show
distinctly the French influence. Kuhnau looms up large chiefly on
account of his sonatas, which are in form and extent the biggest works
yet attempted for clavier. By these he pointed toward a great expansion
of the art; but as a matter of fact little came of it. In France,
Italy, and Germany the small forms were destined to remain the most
popular in harpsichord music; and the sonatas and concertos of Bach are
immediately influenced by study of the Italian masters, Corelli and
Vivaldi.
In Italy, the birthplace of organ music and so of a part of harpsichord
music, interest in keyboard music of any kind declined after the
death of Frescobaldi in 1644, and was replaced by interest in opera
and in music for the violin. Only one name stands out in the second
half of the century, Bernardo Pasquini, of whose work, unhappily,
little remains. He was famous over the world as an organist, and the
epitaph on his tombstone gives him the proud title of organist to the
Senate and People of Rome. Also he was a skillful performer on the
harpsichord; but he is more nearly allied to the old polyphonic school
than to the new. A number of works for one and for two harpsichords
are preserved in manuscript in the British Museum, and these are named
sonatas. Some are actually suites, but those for two harpsichords have
little trace of dance music or form and may be considered as much
sonatas as those works which Kuhnau published under the same title. All
of Kuhnau’s sonatas appeared before 1700 and the date on the manuscript
in the British Museum is 1704. Pasquini was then an old man, and it is
very probable that these sonatas were written some years earlier; in
which case he and not Kuhnau may claim the distinction of first having
written music for the harpsichord on the larger plan of the violin
concerto and the sonatas of Corelli.[10]
Two books of toccatas by Alessandro Scarlatti give that facile composer
the right to be numbered among the great pioneers in the history of
harpsichord music. These toccatas are in distinct movements, usually
in the same key, but sharply contrasted in content. The seventh is
a theme and variations, in which Scarlatti shows an appreciation of
tonal effects and an inventiveness which are astonishingly in advance
of the time. He foreshadows unmistakably the brilliant style of his
son Domenico; indeed, he accounts in part for what has seemed the
marvellous instinct of Domenico. If, as is most natural, Domenico
approached the mysteries of the harpsichord through his father, he
began his career with advantages denied to all others contemporary
with him, save those who, like Grieco, received that father’s
training. Alessandro Scarlatti was one of the most greatly endowed of
all musicians. The trend of the Italian opera during the eighteenth
century toward utter senselessness has been often laid partly to his
influence; but in the history of harpsichord music that influence makes
a brilliant showing in the work of his son, who contributed perhaps
more than any other one man to the technique of writing not only for
harpsichord but for pianoforte.
Little of the harpsichord and clavichord music of the seventeenth
century is heard today. It has in the main only an historical interest.
The student who looks into it will be amazed at some of its beauties;
but as a whole it lacks the variety and emotional strength which claim
a general attention. Nevertheless it is owing to the labor and talent
of the composers of these years that the splendid masterpieces of a
succeeding era were possible. They helped establish the harmonic
foundation of music; they molded the fugue, the prelude, the toccata,
and the suite; they developed a general keyboard style. After the
middle of the century such men as Froberger and Kuhnau in Germany,
Chambonnières, d’Anglebert, and Louis and François Couperin in France,
and Alessandro Scarlatti in Italy, finally gave to harpsichord music
a special style of its own, and to the instrument an independent and
brilliant place among the solo instruments of that day. Out of all the
confusion and uncertainty attendant upon the breaking up of the old art
of vocal polyphony, the enthusiasm of the new opera, the creation of
a new harmonic system, the rise of an instrumental music independent
of words, these men slowly and steadily secured for the harpsichord a
kingdom peculiarly its own.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] It should be noted in passing that during the early stages of the
growth of polyphonic music, roughly from the eleventh to the fifteenth
century, composers had brought over into their vocal music a great deal
of instrumental technique or style, which had been developed on the
crude organs, and on the accompanying instruments of the troubadours.
In the period which we are about to treat the reverse is very plainly
the case.
[2] At the head of Sebastian Bach’s _Musikalisches Opfer_ stands the
Latin superscription: _Regis Iussu Cantio et Reliqua Canonica Arte
Resoluta_. The initial letters form the word ricercar.
[3] _Cf._ Vol. VI, Chap. XV.
[4] Suites were known in England as ‘lessons,’ in France as _ordres_,
in Germany as _Partien_, and in Italy as _sonate da camera_.
[5] There was a form of suite akin to the variation form. In this the
same melody or theme served for the various dance movements, being
treated in the style of the allemande, courante, or other dances
chosen. _Cf._ Peurl’s Pavan, Intrada, Dantz, and Gaillarde (1611); and
Schein’s Pavan, Gailliarde, Courante, Allemande, and Tripla (1617).
This variation suite is rare in harpsichord music. Froberger’s suite on
the old air, _Die Mayerin_, is a conspicuous exception.
[6] ‛_Denn warum sollte man auf dem Clavier nicht eben wie auf anderen
Instrumenten dergleichen Sachen tractieren können?_’ he writes in his
preface to the ‘Seven New _Partien_,’ 1692.
[7] So they were called in France, which until the time of Beethoven
set the model for harpsichord style. In Germany they were called
_Manieren_.
[8] D’Anglebert published in 1689 a set of pieces, for the harpsichord,
containing twenty variations on a melody known as _Folies d’Espagne_,
later immortalized by Corelli.
[9] Le Begue (1630-1702) published _Pièces de clavecin_ in 1677.
[10] See J. S. Shedlock: ‘The Pianoforte Sonata,’ London, 1895.