The outstanding characteristic of the nineteenth century is its moral
fervour. The religious preoccupation of Victorian England is only a
small part of this age of aspiration. In most countries of Europe
philosophy, science, literature, art, and social life bear witness to
the ethical passion, even in the cases of the most indignant revolt
against it. It dominates music from the time of Beethoven onwards; and
even now it is not entirely extinct in the musical world. The spirit
of the French Revolution transformed the musician from a lackey to a
prophet. Mozart was cut off just as he had recorded his vision of the
new age in _The Magic Flute_. Beethoven proclaims it in the _Choral
Fantasia_ and illuminates it still more intensely in _Fidelio_, in
the _Choral Symphony_, the _Missa Solemnis_ and the last quartets.
One cannot class Beethoven with the Romantics any more than Kant or
Goethe. Romanticism stood not for enlightenment but for the reaction
against it. The Romantics were like men who after an earthquake return
to the ruins of their city to see what they can recover from them. It
was not always their own property that they recovered. The aristocrats
had lost their material privilege, but they were still determined to
remain a class apart. The Catholic revival, on the Continent even
more than in England, was the assertion of aristocracy as a moral
principle. It affected music apart from the music that was definitely
liturgical because it brought about a revival of interest in Palestrina
comparable to the revival of interest in Dante. The emancipation of
the artist from feudal servitude encouraged him to assume something of
the privilege of the aristocracy. The typical figure of this movement
is Paganini, from whom are descended Liszt and a multitude of minor
musicians who made it their life-work to play the prophet in public.
The mechanical developments of the new century contributed to the
development of the new outlook on music. As travelling became easier
and music-printing cheaper concerts increased in number and increasing
newspapers gave them increasing publicity. “_Seid umschlungen,
Millionen!_” sang Beethoven, and the millions were embraced, though
perhaps not quite in the way in which Schiller and he had intended.
The modern musician is often tempted to see nothing in the art of
the past century but pretentiousness. It is not altogether just to
accuse the century of megalomania. Isolated musicians, such as Liszt,
Berlioz and Wagner, were certainly possessed with the idea of their
own greatness. One might say the same of Beethoven himself; but in
Beethoven’s case the consciousness of his own greatness was inseparable
from a deep feeling of humility and an overwhelming sense of duty.
Beethoven was no respecter of persons, but he had the philosopher’s
intuition of his relation to humanity and of humanity’s relation to
the universe. Undoubtedly many artists of the nineteenth century
were stimulated by his example to attempt works on a needlessly
colossal scale, especially in Germany, where metaphysical studies have
always influenced a circle that extended far beyond the professed
philosophers. An ethical view of music became more and more strongly
marked in Germany; during the latter half of the century it made itself
felt in England, and to a slighter extent even in France. By the end
of the century there was a very definite tendency to regard music as a
form of free religious worship, expressing and stimulating mystical
experience for temperaments which could no longer be satisfied by
dogmatic theology.
X
It is at all times difficult to draw a line between religious
exaltation and rhetorical pretentiousness. A consideration of the
technical means of expression in music may help us to clear our minds.
Since the middle of the fifteenth century music has exhibited a
perpetual struggle between counterpoint and harmony, between what are
sometimes called the horizontal and vertical tendencies of the art. The
horizontal conception of music is, as all musicians know, the primary
musical instinct to sing and to elaborate the art by the combination
of voices each singing its own independently expressive line and
achieving further emotional force by the ordered clash of dissonance.
The vertical conception cannot really be separated entirely from the
horizontal, for it has grown out of it. It derives its emotional force
from the assumption of periodic stresses, and the study of harmony is
therefore inseparable from that of rhythm. It is regular rhythm which
gives different kinds of chords their æsthetic and the quasi-logical
values.
Melody represents individuality and counterpoint the interaction and
conflict of individualities. Harmony represents the community as a
whole under the direction of the mind which has created the music.
It is therefore natural that as music comes to be associated with
communal feeling on a large scale, with such ideas, for instance, as
the universal brotherhood of man, it should tend to become more and
more predominantly vertical in method. The ordinary music-lover can
realize this from his recollections of Bach and Handel. Bach’s music
is mainly horizontal in tendency. It is music for small groups of
performers, seldom suited to interpretation by large bodies. Handel’s
music, in which the vertical method is far more conspicuous, gains
rather than loses by the multiplication of voices and instruments, and
for this reason Handel is to most Englishmen the ideal composer for
occasions of national ceremony. The emotional effect is intensified
by the actual increase of sound and along with this by the rhythmical
unanimity of the chorus or orchestra. The ordinary man seems to be
curiously susceptible to emotion at the sight of several hundred
people doing exactly the same thing at one moment, as in military and
gymnastic displays, even though the movements executed may be not in
the least interesting in themselves.
The communal feeling which is at the back of most of the music of
the nineteenth century finds its technical expression in blocks of
chords and in strongly accentuated rhythms. A typical example is
the theme which opens the _finale_ of Beethoven’s C minor symphony.
_Lohengrin_ and _Elijah_ are full of instances. In some cases the
impression may be no more than momentary, a mere two or three chords,
but the trick makes its effect. It becomes too obviously a trick in
the hands of Liszt. As a pianist he could not help being attracted
by it. The mechanism of the pianoforte suits full chords better than
the complication of counterpoint, and the percussive action of itself
exaggerates rhythmical stresses. It was the ideal instrument for
Liszt’s grand heroic manner.
The pianoforte was the amateur’s instrument as well as the _virtuoso’s_.
The nineteenth century is the age of the amateur pianist. Music became
the pleasure of the rising middle class, for whose domestic consumption
an endless flood of polite and agreeable music was printed after the
examples set by Mendelssohn and Schumann. Whatever the present age may
think of those two composers it can safely be said that no musicians
have ever been regarded by the general musical public with so widespread
and so heartfelt an affection. Whoever easily recalls the lines
As for some dear familiar strain
Untir’d we ask, and ask again.
Ever, in its melodious store,
Finding a spell unheard before――
must surely connect them in immediate memory with the _Scenes of
Childhood_ or the _Songs without Words_.
It used often to be said of Mendelssohn that “he had nothing to say,
but said it like a gentleman.” To that I may add the observation of
one of my own teachers: “When Mendelssohn couldn’t think of anything
else to say, he said his prayers.” Is it surprising that the England of
Thackeray adored him? To Mendelssohn and Schumann we owe the fashion
of what used to be called “characteristic pieces”――quasi-pictorial
exploitations of certain idioms which at once established themselves
as universally recognizable conventions both of technique and of
sentiment――all those “hunting songs,” “spinning songs,” barcarolles,
cradle songs, wedding marches and funeral marches. At this distance of
time they may have the charm of old-world refinement. But considered
historically, what they brought into music was a multitude of insincere
_clichés_. Mendelssohn and Schumann are themselves remembered for
their very genuine merits. The style which they represented was
absorbed into the work of followers whom it is equally impossible to
forget as well as into that of the innumerable hundreds of purely
commercial composers. Romantic _cliché_ reached its apotheosis in the
symphonic monstrosities of Gustav Mahler. But between Mendelssohn
and Mahler there came others――worthy in some ways of our deepest and
sincerest respect――who from their own high seriousness became victims
of the impressive platitude. Ethical fervour led them only too fatally
into reverent pomposity.
All this false sentiment was diffused universally by the pianoforte;
not merely by the enormous multiplication of instruments and of
performers thereon, but by the intrinsic acoustical character of the
instrument itself. For the sound of the pianoforte cannot press onwards
like that of the voice, the wind instrument or the violin. That is why
“horizontal” music is in reality impossible to it; the most it can do
is to recall the memory of something heard before. It can do this with
extraordinary subtlety. The sudden impact of the hammer on the string
gives it even in its most delicate moments a far clearer articulation
than the voice or the singing instruments. Its whole art is an art of
evasion, illusion and association. It was the ideal instrument for the
romantic temperament. It suggested melody, it intensified harmony; it
falsified the values of both.
The pianoforte naturally attracted intelligent musicians of all grades
because it seemed to place the whole of music within the grasp of two
hands. Singing came to be regarded as something almost vulgar, the
more so since nature has not always distributed voices and brains in
equal proportions. As the ethical view of music deepened, musicians
of serious intention turned more to the stringed instruments than to
the human voice. The instruments could do so much more, they could run
about faster, they had in practice a cleaner accuracy of intonation
and a more extended compass. It was easy to forget that after all they
were nothing more than instruments, and indeed the very fact that they
were instruments seemed to give them a magical character that appealed
mysteriously to the romantic mind.