of Hamburg, a gift which affected him more deeply than any splendour of
royal or academic distinction. With its acceptance his public life may
be said to close. He was now fifty-seven; he had spent nearly forty
years of strenuous and honourable work; his dislike of notoriety grew
naturally keener with advancing age; he had no longer any office or
appointment to call him from his beloved seclusion. The occurrences of
the next seven years may be summed up in a few rare concert-tours or
holiday visits. For the rest he lived among his books; reading, editing,
annotating until the creative moment came, and the world was made richer
by a new masterpiece. Within this period he produced about a score of
compositions: an exquisite violin sonata in D minor; a second string
quintett, even sweeter and more melodious than the first; two volumes of
motets, strong, stately and dignified; two concerted works for clarinet,
of which one at least may rank among the chief glories of musical art,
and a whole underwood of songs and pianoforte pieces, that grow and
blossom in the shadow of the larger forest. But even the records of
achievement become more sparse as the years decline. The evening was at
hand, and the day's work drawing to its close.
It was in the summer of 1896 that he printed his last composition, the
Vier ernste Gesänge. For some little time his health had been giving
cause for anxiety. In the autumn his doctors sent him to Carlsbad in
hope of a cure; then in the early winter appeared symptoms of some
cancerous growth, and the only hope left was for the alleviation of
pain. Yet a few more months he lingered, bearing his death sentence with
the same unselfish fortitude that had marked his life, until on April 3,
1897, the end came and the sufferings were over. With him passed away
one of the noblest figures in all musical history: a great man, generous
and upright, without envy, without arrogance, free from all taint of the
meaner emotions, wholly single-hearted in the service of his ideal. The
happiness which eludes all conscious human pursuit came to him unasked
and unsought; the rewards that he would never stretch a hand to seize
offered themselves for his acceptance. His life was secure from sordid
anxieties, unvexed by the contests and intrigues that have so often
marred an artistic reputation, rich in the love of friends and the
priceless gift of genius. It is not for him that we should mourn, now
that in the fulness of years and honours he has laid his books aside and
turned to sleep.
FOOTNOTES:
[53] Shortened from an article in the issue for November 21, 1862.
[54] To them should be added the last three books of Romances from
Tieck's Magelone, which were not printed until 1868, though they were
almost certainly written some considerable time earlier.
III
THE DIRECTION OF THE NEW PATHS
As Music is the most abstract of the arts, so it is also the most
continuous. In each successive generation the Poet and the Painter are
confronted by approximately the same facts of nature and life: the truth
of representation which forms an essential part of their work is
relative to an external model which is comparatively unchanging. Thus,
in a certain degree, every age of representative art stands on a level
with its predecessors, and however much it is influenced by traditions
of style, is even more affected by its direct relation to physical
realities. Music, on the other hand, is simply the gradual mastery of a
particular medium by the pure action of the human mind. Its actual
method contains no concrete element at all, and in it, therefore, every
generation must take its point of departure, not from the same universe
which appealed to previous artists, but from the actual achievement
which previous artists have handed down. The Greeks were as keenly alive
to the beauty of music as to that of poetry: to us their poetry is a
delight and their music a bewilderment. To the Italians of the great
artistic period, the charm of music was as vivid as that of painting;
to us their painting is almost a finality, and their music, even in
Palestrina, but the supreme expression of a transitory phase. And this
is not because music is in any sense the youngest of the arts: for such
a theory is refuted by the most casual survey of human history. The real
reason would seem to be, that in the representative arts we have a
series of comparatively independent periods, each manifesting afresh the
attitude of an artistic mind to a fixed world of nature: whereas, in
music, the periods are stages of a continuous evolution, and the whole
environment of the artist is summed up in the inheritance that he
derives from the past.
This distinction must, of course, be stated not as absolute, but as
relative. For, in the first place, every work of art is the outcome of
its creator's personality, and depends, therefore, on the particular
attributes of his character and temperament. Poetry, like the poet, is
born, not made: painting, even if it borrow its model from nature, must
find its power of vision in the soul of the artist: and music, in like
manner, is worth nothing unless it arises from a true and spontaneous
emotion. The gift of melody, the sense of ideal beauty, the capacity for
genuine and noble feeling, are qualities which cannot be learned or
communicated: they constitute the life of the art, and external forces
can only influence its training. Further, it is idle to speak of the
'representative' artists as unaffected by the general course of æsthetic
history. Only, it is here contended, that their debt to the past is
appreciably less than that of the musician, because their debt to the
present is appreciably greater.
It is impossible, then, to estimate a composer without special
reference to his historical conditions. For the whole of his work
consists in expressing thought, which he originates through a medium
which he inherits, and, to gauge his success, we must know how the art
stood before it passed into his hands, and to what extent he has
enriched or augmented its resources. There are, therefore, two
questions, and only two, to which musical criticism can address itself:
first, whether the feeling implied by the work is one that commands our
sympathy: second, whether in expressing it the artist has assimilated
all that is best in a previous tradition, and has himself advanced that
tradition towards a fuller and more perfect development. And, as
the former of these questions is the more difficult of the two, we
may perhaps defer it until the latter has received some share of
consideration.
Now, the primary fact in music is the simple melodic phrase: the
spontaneous, almost unconscious, utterance of an emotional state that is
too vivid for ordinary speech. At first, this music is entirely artless,
for art only begins when the medium is recognised as possessing an
intrinsic interest; then there gradually arises an attempt to make the
phrases more coherent, and so more expressive, until the first landmark
is reached in the establishment of a definite scale-system like
that of Greece. Thus Greek music may be taken as the lowest stage
of organisation in the European history of the art. It was not
unscientific, for it had the modes, with their elaborate subtleties of
diatonic, chromatic and enharmonic, but we may search its records in
vain for any distinctive recognition of musical form. Its effect, to
judge from the allusions in Plato and Aristotle, seems to have been
wholly emotional, and its intellectual basis was not artistic but
mathematical in character.
The Greek modes were revised by Claudius Ptolemy, and on the basis of
his revisions was established the system of the mediæval church. In it
the claims of the medium began to receive further attention, and the
next step was the gradual elaboration of counterpoint, that is, the
combination of simultaneous voice parts, each independent, but all
conducing to a result of uniform and coherent texture. Starting from the
crude origins of descant and faux-bourdon, the new method steadily grew
and developed, through Dunstable, Dufay, Josquin, and a host of other
great writers, until it reached the second universal landmark in the
magnificent climax of Palestrina. If the ecclesiastical modes had been
final, music would never have advanced beyond the 'Missa Papæ Marcelli,'
and the 'Æterna Christi Munera.'
But the modes were not final. For certain scientific reasons, into which
it is here needless to enter, they were incapable either of a common
tonality or of a coherent system of modulation. Hence, while the
organisation of harmony could be carried by the ecclesiastical composers
to a high degree of perfection, the organisation of key lay outside
their horizon altogether. And while they were busy, like the schoolmen,
in 'applying a method received on authority to a matter received on
authority,' the unrecognised popular musicians, who had never heard of
Ptolemy, and cared nothing about counterpoint, were writing tunes in
which our modern scale-system begins to make a tentative and hesitating
appearance. It is not too much to say that the dances collected in
Arbeau's Orchesographie come nearer to our sense of tonality than all
the masses and madrigals that contemporary learning could produce. In a
word, the growth of harmony belongs to the Church, the growth of key to
the people.
Then came the most important dynamic change in all musical history: the
Florentine revolution of 1600. Its ostensible object was frankly
dramatic--the revival of Greek tragedy under such altered conditions as
were implied by the change of language and civilisation: its real
importance was that it destroyed the convention of the modes, and called
tonality from the country fair to the theatre and the concert-room. For
a while, no doubt, the dramatic ideal overpowered everything else, and
even the Church left off writing masses and took to oratorios instead;
but when pure music reasserted itself, it found an entirely new set of
problems waiting for solution. Harmony had to be organised, not on the
basis of the mode, but on the basis of the modern scale, and thus had to
take into account a question of key-relationship which had never fallen
within the scope of the ecclesiastical period. And hence followed a line
of development beginning about the time of the younger Gabrieli, and
passing through the great choral composers of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries until the third landmark of our musical history was
attained in the person of John Sebastian Bach. His polyphony, as applied
to the emotional expression of his time, is simply the best of which the
art of music is capable. Given the phrases which he employed as
subjects, the human mind cannot conceive their being treated with a more
complete harmonic perfection.
Meantime, ever since the floodgates had been opened by the audacious
hand of Florentine amateurs, another and more copious stream of tendency
had been flowing along a separate channel. The new tonality had not only
made a great difference in the harmonic aspect of music, it had
virtually opened a new field by suggesting the first possibilities of
form and structure. Composers began gradually to see that the
equalisation of the scales afforded the material for a more perfect and
coherent system of design: modulation became a reality, and with it the
recognition of different tonics in successive paragraphs or cantos of
the composition. They therefore took the simplest effects of contrast,
as presented by the dances and Volkslieder of the people, and proceeded
to develop them into a fuller diversity of organisation. At first, no
doubt, they went on something of a wrong tack: the structural problem
received a divided attention, for polyphony was still regarded as
paramount, but yet in the chamber music of Corelli and Vivaldi, and in
the harpsichord pieces of Scarlatti, Couperin and Rameau may be traced a
continuous effort not only to make the form distinct, but to make it in
some degree progressive. And on the death of Bach, when polyphony had
reached a point from which it seemed impossible to advance, music turned
almost entirely to questions of structure, and for the next two
generations set itself deliberately to perfect the outline of the
sonata, the quartett, and the symphony. This helps to explain the fact,
otherwise inexplicable, that Bach's influence on the latter half of the
eighteenth century was practically non-existent. Partly, of course, we
may account for it by remembering that musical art passed, for a
time, into another country, but it is a still stronger reason that
composition was occupied with another set of problems. The organisation
of harmony is that of simultaneous strains; the organisation of key is
that of successive passages; and it is obvious that the perfection of
the one will afford but little assistance to the development of the
other. And so the line of structural evolution passed through Haydn and
Mozart, until, in the work of Beethoven, it also attained a temporary
climax and culmination. With him, then, the treatment of the musical
medium may be held to have reached its fourth principal landmark.
After Beethoven came the Romantic School, the historical importance of
which can roughly be epitomised under two heads. First, it widened the
range of emotional expression, and so affected music from the standpoint
of the idea. Secondly, it returned to Bach, and adapted his polyphonic
system to the requirements of the new musical language. But as its
artistic strength was its reverence for Bach, so its artistic weakness
was its neglect of Beethoven. On the polyphonic side it maintained the
old traditions, and even, in some respects, advanced upon them, since
the more 'romantic' the idea to be expressed, the more difficult is pure
polyphony in its expression. But, on the structural side, it was
distinctly retrograde, and either confined itself to the smaller and
more rudimentary forms, or, when it attempted those of a larger scope,
treated them with something of negligence and preoccupation. Berlioz no
doubt took Beethoven for his master, but it was as a poet, not as a
musician. And the other great masters of the school, for all their
genius and their earnestness and their love of beauty, are yet, in
questions of form, but the minor Socratics of our nineteenth century
music, carrying on, each from his own standpoint, some one part of the
previous tradition, but neither interpreting nor advancing its full and
entire content.
A special word may be said on the relation of Wagner to this general
course of musical development. As a dramatist, he stands in some degree
aloof: his art is a different art, his methods are different methods,
his ancestry may be traced to Shakespear and Æschylus as readily as to
Bach and Palestrina. The explanation of his work is always the dramatic
explanation: his structure is determined not by principles of pure
music, but by the exigencies of the scene. Hence, apart from such a
secondary point as orchestration, it is only in his splendid, reckless,
audacious polyphony that he has really enlarged the treatment of musical
technique. His most enthusiastic followers claim for him that he has
'killed the symphony,' a statement which, though it is radically untrue,
is enough to dissociate him from an art that recognises the symphony as
its crowning achievement. The drama of the future will accept him as one
of its greatest potentates: the music of the future will see in him the
lord of a single province, whose government has in one respect assisted
the consolidation of the others.
What, then, is required to sum up the tendencies of the present age, and
to bring Music to the fifth landmark in its history. Surely a composer,
who, while he maintains and develops the harmonic traditions of the
Romantic School, shall even more devote himself to the restoration and
evolution of musical structure: who shall take up the classical form
where Beethoven left it; who shall aid to free it from the conventions
which that greatest of all masters did not wholly succeed in loosening;
who shall carry it to a further stage and raise it to a fuller
organisation. And such a composer has appeared. So far as concerns the
technical problem of composition--and it must be remembered that this is
at present the only topic under discussion--the work of Brahms is the
actual crown and climax of our present Musical art. He is in exact and
literal truth 'der der kommen musste:' the man for whom Music has been
waiting. In him converge all previous streams of tendency, not as into a
pool, stagnant, passive, and motionless, but as into a noble river that
receives its tributary waters and bears them onward in larger and
statelier volume.
Tintoret claimed 'the drawing of Michael Angelo and the colouring of
Titian': Brahms, in like manner, may claim the counterpoint of Bach and
the structure of Beethoven. And not only has he entered into the
inheritance of these two composers; he has put their legacies to
interest, and has enriched the world with an augmentation of their
wealth. He is no mere Alexandrine, no grammarian poet, content to
accumulate with a patient and laborious industry the gifts that have
been lavished by a previous age; the artistic heritage is not won by
right of labour, and its dynasty only falls to these who are born in the
purple. Erudition, in short, may copy the work of Genius; but Genius
alone can develop it.
Are we to say, then, that Brahms is a more consummate master of his
medium than Bach or Beethoven? By no means; but, in consequence of
their work, his medium is more plastic than theirs. For certain
historical reasons, with which the question of personal capacity has
nothing to do, the key-system of Bach is rudimentary beside that of
Beethoven, and the polyphony of Beethoven less perfect, perhaps, than
that of Bach. To Brahms we may apply Dryden's famous epigram, in which
the force of Nature 'to make a third has joined the other two.' By his
education he learned to assimilate their separate methods; by his
position, in the later days of Romance, he found a new emotional
language in established use; by his own genius he has made the forms
wider and more flexible, and has shown once more that they are not
artificial devices, but the organic embodiment of artistic life.
It follows, then, to maintain this statement with a few words of
commentary and illustration. And, first, we may take the polyphonic
problem, not only because it has some chronological priority, but
because the system which it implies is more limited and more readily
exhaustible. Now the essential value of Bach's work in this respect is
that, in addition to 'writing free and characteristic parts for the
several voices in combination,' he 'made the harmonies, which were the
sum of the combined counterpoints, move so as to illustrate the
principles of harmonic form, and thus give to the hearer the sense
of orderliness and design, as well as the sense of contrapuntal
complexity,'[55] and since there are no other aims to which polyphonic
writing can be directed, it would seem as though Bach's achievement were
final, as though it left nothing for future generations to add. But a
somewhat closer reflection will show that there are at least two points
in which a possibility of progress may be admitted.
One is the immense growth of Instrumental Music, which has virtually
brought with it a new material for treatment. Bach's part-writing is
generally vocal in basis, the work of an organist who feels the presence
of his choir and his congregation; even his concerti are not far removed
from the canzonas which were specified as 'buone da cantare e suonare.'
But after him came a generation of composers who recognised and brought
into fuller use the peculiar character and flexibility of the strings,
and thus opened out a new region, which it has been one of the
privileges of Brahms to explore. Thus while, in his organ compositions,
in his motetts, in the choruses of the Requiem, Brahms has closely
followed the methods of Bach (though even here he solves one or two
problems which were left untouched by the earlier master), in such
examples as the two string Sestetts and the Symphony in E minor, he
adapts those methods to a material which he had inherited from a later
ancestry. And here it may be noticed that his simplest accompaniments
are always characteristic. Even the arpeggio figure, which is usually
the easiest and most careless of all harmonic devices acquires in him a
special significance and import.
The other point is the change in emotional and melodic phraseology, due
partly to the influence of Beethoven and Schubert, partly to that of the
more distinctively Romantic composers. It is quite certain that the
characteristic melody of the eighteenth century is, on the whole, more
susceptible of polyphonic treatment than that of our own time. The
finale of the Jupiter Symphony is, in any case, a stupendous effort of
genius; but take five typical tunes of Liszt or Berlioz, and Mozart
himself could not have dealt with them as he dealt with his own phrases.
The curve of melody has altered in some degree, and thus, while it has
given new effects of beauty, it has become a little less adaptable to
certain of its requirements. No doubt Schumann developed a wonderful
polyphonic system of his own; but even in him we may recognise certain
limits: and, moreover, he stands, in this respect, almost alone as an
intermediary between Bach and Brahms. We are driven, then, to conclude
either that polyphony should grow obsolete, which the most unthinking
audacity can hardly affirm, or that the extreme of Romantic expression
has lost in art what it has gained in poetry. And herein Brahms appears
as a true reformer. His thought is in full accord with the general
poetic conception of our age, but he has selected from its entire range
those particular forms of phrase and melody which are most conspicuously
plastic and malleable. The opening of the A major Quartett is romantic
enough, but it admits of that marvellous piece of contrapuntal imitation
which surprises us in the coda. The Symphony in F major is one of the
least formal of compositions, but the most laborious academician in
music could not compile a more elaborate polyphony than Brahms has here
created. Indeed, there is little necessity to search for instances: they
may be found on almost every page of the concerted or choral works. And,
though it be true that Bach is often curiously modern in idea, though he
frequently stands nearer to us than Handel or Haydn or Mozart, the fact
still remains, that Brahms is in closer and more intimate sympathy with
him than even the romantic composers who made him their ostensible
pattern and prototype.
So far, then, as relates to the harmonic aspect, Brahms may be regarded
as a real stage in the evolution of Musical Art. There remains the more
important question of his contributions to the development of structure:
in other words, of his relation to Beethoven. The harmonic ideal had
been maintained, in varying degree, by all composers of the first rank,
and herein the traditions of Schumann and Chopin were of distinct and
momentous service to their successor; but the structural ideal had,
since 1830, been allowed to fall into comparative neglect, and in
restoring it Brahms had virtually to do his work single-handed. No
doubt, in short lyric forms, and even in their direct expansion to a
larger scale, the Romantic musicians had shown a considerable mastery of
outline; but in the more complex organism of symphony and concerto, they
had fallen somewhat out of the line of progress, and had diverged from
the methods of the 'Emperor' and the 'A major.' Hence the estimate of
Brahms' position in this matter is of double interest: partly because of
the intrinsic value of key-structure in musical organisation, partly
because the line of development was in some degree broken and
obliterated.
Now it has been already maintained that the sonata form, in its widest
and most comprehensive signification, represents the highest type of
structure to which the Art of Music has yet advanced. Other instrumental
forms--the romance, the fantasia, the nocturne--are modelled, with more
or less of exactitude, upon sonata movements; and the same is true even
of vocal forms, except in so far as they are influenced by the fugue or
affected by the extra-musical requirements of the words. It is therefore
to works ostensibly in sonata form that we must primarily address
ourselves. And here it may at once be stated that in a vast majority of
the details, Beethoven seems to have reached
The outside verge that rounds our faculty.