Music Comes of Age
CHAPTER XV
Dance Tunes Grow Up—Suites—Violin Makers of Cremona
In our range of musical mountains, we see just ahead of us one of the mightiest giants of them all, Johann Sebastian Bach, dwarfing everything around it and we must resist the temptation of skipping all the smaller mountains, for there is no musical aeroplane by means of which we can fly across and land safely on Mt. Bach. This grand old mountain, Bach, is such a tremendous landmark in the growth of music, that when we reach it we realize that everything that we have passed has been a journey of preparation. Bach is not the only peak, for there are Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Brahms, Wagner and others who stand out against the musical horizon.
Before coming to Bach, however, we must bridge over the time when music was still in its youth in the 16th and 17th centuries, to when it became full grown and mature in the 18th. Music has now come of age: it has perfected scales, notation, and developed form and instruments; it is ready to go into the world and take its place with painting, sculpture, poetry, drama and architecture as a full grown art!
Nothing through which music has passed has been lost, but it has been built like the great Egyptian Pyramids by adding one huge block on top of another. It has gone from the noise of primitive man with his drum, to the attempts of the savage to sing and to make crude instruments, to the music of the ancient nations in their religious ceremonies and entertainments, to the Arab singer who handed his art to the western world through the troubadours, to the people of all times and nations who danced and sang for the joy of it. It passed from the Greek drama and music schools where definite scales and modes were formed, to the early Christian Church which kept it alive during the Dark Ages and gradually invented ways to write it, and later to the “Golden Age” of the Catholic Church. It had seen the rise of schools and the perfection of the polyphonic system give way to the recitative and the aria, which in turn brought about opera, oratorio, and instrumental music. It has seen counterpoint give way to harmony, and yet the growth of music is not complete and never will be, but constantly new forms will blossom out of the old.
The 15th and 16th centuries were vocal. The 17th was instrumental and opened the way for so-called modern music, that is, for Bach’s compositions and all that followed.
Birth of Chamber Music
Gabrieli in the 16th century in Venice, sometimes wrote madrigals for instruments instead of for voices, and he added instruments to accompany the motets and masses (page [157]); this led to composing works for groups of instruments instead of playing madrigals that had been composed for voices. The English often wrote on their compositions, “fit for voices and for viols.” After they once started playing the part songs on viols, the composers soon found out that they could write more interesting and more difficult things for instruments than they could for voices; this led to the writing of very florid music for instruments alone. This florid part-writing, not unlike the Gloss of the Arabs, and the improvisations of the soloists in the early Catholic Church, soon became so overloaded with trills, fancy turns and runs that it had to be reformed again.
In the 17th century, the lute, the popular instrument of the court and the home for so many years, even centuries, suddenly found its rival in the little keyboard instrument called the spinet and virginal in England, and the clavecin in France. In Italy and France, as in England, there were famous performers and composers for these instruments, and many volumes of charming music were written for it.
Dance Tunes Grow up Into Suites
One of the first requirements of art works of all kinds is contrast. The line and the curve are found in primitive art, light must have shadow, one wing of a building must have another to balance it, and a slow serious piece of music is usually followed by a gay one for contrast. The Arabs understood this law of contrast, for in their ancient songs we find the seed of a form that has been most important in the growth of music. They made little suites by putting two, three, four or more songs together; each song had its mode, and one would be slow and sad, and the next fast and gay. The principal music of the 17th century was the Suite, a group of pieces which had grown out of the old folk dances. (Chapter IX.) The 17th century composers, like the Arabs, feeling the need of contrast, strung several of these dances together to form the Suite. So Suites were written for clavecins and harpsichords, for violins alone and for organs, for groups of stringed instruments and other chamber music combinations. Some of these dances were in duple time, some in triple; some were slow and some were fast; some were stately and some gay. The different pieces forming a suite, had to be written in the same key. These suites were known by different names in different countries, such as partitas, exercises, lessons, sonate da camera, ordres. In England the name suite was given to this form, then the Germans adopted it, and later the great Bach wrote suites which he also called partitas. In Italy, the suite was called sonata da camera (chamber sonata) and sonata da chiesa (church sonata) and out of all this have grown the very important sonata, symphony and chamber music quartet, trio, quintet, etc.
Here are some of the dance forms used in the suite:
Allemande (duple time or measure: moderately slow), Sarabande (triple time: slow, stately), Loure (duple time: slow), Gavotte (duple time: moderately fast), Musette (duple time: moderately fast), Bourrée (duple time: a little faster than the Gavotte), Minuet (triple time: moderately fast), Passepied (triple time: a fast minuet), Rigaudon (duple time: slower than the Bourrée), Tambourin (duple time: fast), Pavan (duple time: rather slow), Courante, Corrente (triple time: fast), Chaconne (triple time: moderately fast), Passacaglia (like Chaconne, but more stately) and Gigue (sometimes duple and sometimes triple time: very fast: almost always the last movement of a suite).
The Italians of the 17th century wrote suites, and Italy still held the place as leading the world in musical composition, just as it had in the 15th and 16th. We find the names of Frescobaldi, Michelangelo Rossi, Legrenzi, Bononcini, Giovanni Battista Vitali, Alessandro Scarlatti and his son Domenico, and going over into the seventeen-hundreds, Niccolo Porpora, Padre Martini, Paradies, and Baldassare Galuppi, whom we know through Robert Browning’s poem, A Toccata of Galuppi’s. Most of these names you will find on the concert programs of today.
“Serious” Scarlatti and Opera Writers
Alessandro Scarlatti (1659–1725) is one of the most important Italian composers of the 17th century, and although he did not have great success during his lifetime, his compositions have outlived those of other writers, whose works were popular during his day. He was called “serious Scarlatti,” and it was probably the very seriousness with which he looked upon his work that made him write without seeking public approval. Besides composing pieces for the spinet and harpsichord, and symphonies, sonatas, suites and concertos for different instruments, he wrote 125 operas, and over 500 cantatas, oratorios and church music. He was one of several Italians who continued the work of the first opera writers. Francesco Cavalli (1599–1676), Giacomo Carissimi (1603–1674), Luigi Rossi, Marc Antonio Cesti (1628–1669), Francesco Provenzale (1610–1704), Stradella (1645–1682), Caldara (1670–1736), Lotti (1667–1740), Marcello (1686–1739), Leo (1694–1746), and others carried the ideas of Scarlatti into the 18th century. Many of these carried Italian opera into England, Germany and France, where it became the model for their opera.
Stradella is quite as famous for his romantic love story, as he is for the operas he left. This made an interesting libretto in the 19th century for a German opera writer, Flotow, who was also the composer of the well-known opera Martha.
“La Serva Padrona” Points the Way
Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710–1736), who died when he was only twenty-six years old, was looked upon as a genius, and in his early youth had written two works that were models for many that followed, a Stabat Mater and a comic opera, La Serva Padrona, which was played recently in America under the title of The Mistress Maid. When this little opera was performed in Paris (1752) it caused a very famous musical quarrel known as the “war of the buffoons.” (Page [230].)
Jomelli (1714–1774), the composer of fifty-five operas, was a Neapolitan but he lived in Germany for so many years, that he had more influence on early German opera than on the Italian.
All the opera of this period, particularly the Italian, was very loosely put together and was not opera as we have it today. Later Gluck brought it to the point where it came of age.
Metastasio—Maker of Opera Librettos
These writers of the 18th century used the librettos of a poet and dramatist, Metastasio (1698–1782), who had a strong influence in the development of opera not only in his native Italy, but in other countries. He supplied texts for 1200 operatic scores! He understood music so well, that he was a great help to the composers who listened with attention to his advice. His life covered practically all of the 18th century.
A Celebrated Singing Teacher and Composer
When you read of Haydn, you will see that he played accompaniments and acted as valet to the eminent singing teacher Niccolo Porpora (1686–1767). This famous Italian had many pupils in the opera houses all over Europe, and was considered the greatest singing teacher in the world. One of his pupils in Dresden was the young princess Marie Antoinette before she became Queen of France. Porpora was a fine composer, and wrote many operas, cantatas, masses, oratorios, and sonatas of which form he was one of the inventors. Among his pupils were Haydn, Marcello, Tartini, Leo, Galuppi, Padre Martini, Jomelli, Pergolesi, Caffarelli and Farinelli. This list shows that he trained composers as well as singers.
The Violin Makers of Cremona
Important changes, such as instrumental music coming into fashion, do not happen without good reasons. We are so accustomed to the violin, that we forget that there was a time when it did not exist, but until about three centuries ago, there was none. We are always eager to have new pianos, for the old ones wear out, but with violins the older they are, the better! But they must be masterpieces to begin with. All the famous violinists of the day like Kreisler, Elman, Heifetz, etc., have marvelous old violins that cost fortunes, and most of them were made by the violin makers of Cremona, a little town in northern Italy, the birthplace of Monteverde.
The troubadours played the accompaniments to their songs on stringed instruments called violes or vielles, which were the grandparents of the violins. In the 15th century bowed instruments were made similar in range to the human voice; these were called treble or discant viol, tenor viol, bass viol and the double-bass, and in England these went into the “chest of viols” (Page [198]). Many improvements were made in the shape, size and tone of the instruments and by the middle of the 17th century the Italian makers were ready to create violins, perfect of their kind, which have never been surpassed. The secret of the tone of these instruments is said to be in the varnish which the Cremona makers used, the recipe of which has been lost, but we met a violin maker recently in Paris who had discovered it in an old Italian book, and he has spent years in trying to reproduce it. The old Italian varnish and the mellowing of the wood with time are two reasons why age makes the old violins better.
For several centuries, practically all the lutes and the viols that supplied Europe were made by colonies of instrument makers who lived in Lombardy (North Italy) and the Tyrol (South Austria). Two towns in Lombardy became especially famous for their violins, Brescia in which Gaspara di Salo and Maggini lived, and Cremona which was the home of the Amati, Stradivari and Guarneri families. In The Orchestra and Its Instruments, Esther Singleton says: “It is thrilling to realize that in this little town, in three workshops side by side, on the Piazza San Domenico, all the great violins of the world were made and in friendly competition by the three families.” This covered the period from 1560 to 1760. These men worked together with just one object in life,—to turn out of their shops the most perfect instruments that could possibly be made! With what care they selected the wood! How they worked to make the tone of each instrument as beautiful as possible! Now you will know when you hear of an Amati violin, or a Stradivarius, a Guanerius or a Maggini, that they are worth their weight in gold and are among the rarest art treasures of the world. These were not the only violin makers in Lombardy, for there were long lists of them, and there were also many in the Tyrol. One of the most famous of these was Stainer who lived at Innsbruck. “It is said that this old maker used to walk through the wooded slopes of the Tyrolean mountains with a hammer in his hand and that he would knock the trunks of the trees and listen to the vibrations. When he found a tree that suited him, he had it cut down to use in making his instruments.” (Esther Singleton.)
These instrument makers made not only violins, but also lutes, mandolins, guitars, violas, violoncellos, and double-basses. The Italians were the first to develop the last two. The ’cello, as we call the violoncello for short, was the child of an instrument named the viola da gamba (translated leg-viola because it was held against the leg), which for many years was the most popular of all bowed instruments. We do not find many examples of the instruments even in museums for they were made over into ’cellos when the latter came into fashion. There is one viola da gamba in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, however, which was imported from France by the Sisterhood of the General Hospital in Montreal before the conquest of Canada, and was used in the convent choir many years before there were any organs and pianos in the New World. The first ’cello to attract attention was made in 1691 by a famous wood carver and presented to the Duke of Modena. A member of the Amati family in the 16th century was the first to turn the viola da gamba into a violoncello. The ’cello and the double-bass were made more successfully by Bergonzi than by the Cremona makers, although Maggini, Amati and Galiano made very fine ones.
The viola is a descendant of the viola d’amore. These and the later violas, used in the string quartets, orchestras, and as solo instruments, were made by a Tyrolese named Gaspard Duiffaprugcar in the 16th century. His instruments are marvelous works of art. In the back of one is a riddle in Latin: can you guess the answer? “I was living in the forest; the cruel axe killed me. Living, I was mute; dead, I sing sweetly.” When madrigals and motets were first played on stringed instruments, the principal melody was given to the tenor viol, the ancestor of the viola, even today called the alto or the tenor, but after the violin came into general use, the viola was treated like a step-child, for it is too large for a violin and too small for a violoncello. We have Mozart to thank for discovering that the viola had something beautiful and important to say as a solo instrument especially in passages where he needed a tender, sad or melancholy voice. You will read later that Beethoven, too, loved the poor neglected viola. He, Berlioz and Wagner used the instrument to great advantage.
In 1572 Pope Pius V sent Charles IX, King of France, a present of thirty-eight bowed instruments made by the first Amati. During the French Revolution, the mob broke into the palace at Versailles, and all but two violins and a ’cello were destroyed! What a loss to art such destruction was!
Showing Off the New Instruments
With this development of exquisite instruments, came the desire to use them and to write new compositions to show them off. These instruments gave unlimited possibilities for technic and tone, and created the school of Italian violinists and composers of the 17th and 18th centuries. If polyphonic music had still been in the lead, the development of solo instruments would have been impossible, but in trying to find new forms, the first opera inventors had broken the backbone of polyphony, and had replaced it with monody, or single line melody. Then, too, folk dances had taken the public fancy and had been made into suites, which could be played on solo bowed instruments with accompaniments, on spinets and organs, or on groups of instruments. The sonata da camera was really a suite of dances and was the first form used by these new composers for violin. About the middle of the 17th century, instrumental performances without any vocal music came to be a part of the services of the Catholic Church for the priests were quick to see in the violin playing, a refining influence. Here the sonata da camera or “room sonata” was turned into the more serious sonata da chiesa or “church sonata” gradually losing its dance character, and thus became the seed of the sonata form of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.
Giovanni Battista Vitali (1644–1692) is the first great master of the violin sonata; after him, Torelli (1657–1716) added a new and important kind of violin composition,—the Concerto. He called his compositions, Concerti da Camera and Concerti Grossi, which names and form were used by Vivaldi, Corelli, Handel and Bach. This Concerto Grosso was a sonata da chiesa accompanied not by a single instrument as was the habit with the sonata da chiesa and the sonata da camera, but by a group of bowed instruments to which a lute, organ and, later, a harpsichord were added.
At this time, all musicians were, as a matter of course, violinists, just as today all great composers can play the piano. One of the greatest of these composer-violinists was Arcangelo Corelli (1653–1713), whose works are often played by violinists of our own time, and have served as models for composers. He was one of the first to try to write music that should show off the beauty and possibilities of the violin.
The “Golden Age” of the Italian violin composers dated from 1720 to 1750, and was the time of Locatelli, Pugnani, Nardini, Veracini, Tartini and Vivaldi who added oboes and horns to the orchestral accompaniment of the Concerti Grossi. Corelli and Vivaldi were the models used by the German school of violinists who appeared about this time. Tartini was the musical authority of his century, and no violinist felt sure of his place as an artist until he had been heard and approved by Tartini. He was the composer of the famous piece called The Devil’s Trill. Although Vivaldi was not looked upon with great esteem in his own time, he was used as a model by Johann Sebastian Bach.
Padre Martini, recognized by all Europe as the greatest authority on musical subjects, lived in Bologna where he was visited by such musicians as Grétry, Gluck, Mozart and one of the sons of Bach. Padre, or Father, Martini was a Franciscan monk, a fine composer, a learned historian, a master of counterpoint, and the owner of a musical library of 17,000 volumes! He helped everyone who sought him, and was loved by the entire musical world.
Once a year a great music festival was held in Bologna by the Philharmonic Society and new works by the Bolognese composers were performed. One hundred musicians took part in the orchestra and the choruses, and each composer conducted his own work. It was an honor to be present at this annual festival, and Italian and foreign musicians came from all over Europe to attend it. Young composers sometimes became famous over night here, for the critics were all invited and serious decisions were made as to the value of new music. Dr. Burney, a famous English musical historian of the 18th century, tells of meeting Leopold Mozart and his young son, Wolfgang Amadeus, at one of these festivals. Through the kind scheming of Padre Martini were they admitted!
Rome, in the 18th century was still the great music center, and guided the religious music of the world. It had wonderful collections of old music which attracted students from all over; it had seven or eight very famous theatres, where opera seria and opera buffa were given. (Today we call them grand opera and comic opera.) The Roman public was very difficult to please and because of the severity of their judgments, opera writers suffered every time their new works had first performances. Just think how you would feel if you had composed an opera, and by accident had put in a melody that sounded something like one that Mozart, Wagner, Puccini or Verdi had composed, if the whole house should break into shouts of “Bravo, Mozart!” or “Bravo, Wagner!” or “Bravo, Puccini!!” etc. This is what used to happen in Rome, but no doubt it was a good thing because it stopped a habit the composers had in those days, of helping themselves to each other’s melodies.
Domenico Scarlatti
But here we must pause for a moment to tell you of the life and work of Alessandro Scarlatti’s son, Domenico, who was born in Naples in 1685, the same year as Bach and Handel. When you recall how many operas the father wrote, it seems queer that his son did not follow in his footsteps. The truth is that he did write operas for the private theatre of the Queen of Poland in Rome, and also sacred music while he was chapel master of St. Peter’s, but he became immortal as a composer of harpsichord music. In the influence he had in the growing up of piano music, he can be compared to Chopin and Liszt, and is a founder of piano music style, an honor, which he shares with the French Couperin and Rameau, his contemporaries. The difference is that the two Frenchmen have a delicacy and grace that recall their period of wigs and satins and laces, while Scarlatti’s works have strength, vigor and daring that take them out of any special period and place them beside the great piano compositions of all time.
Scarlatti’s sonatas are sonatas in the Italian sense of a sound-piece; they are not, like the suites, in several movements, but each is in one movement, which forecasts the modern sonata form with its two main contrasting themes and development.
The “serious Scarlatti” understood his son’s talent, for he sent him at the age of 20 to Florence to a member of the powerful de Medici family with this letter: “This son of mine is an eagle whose wings are grown; he ought not to stay idle in the nest, and I ought not to hinder his flight.”
Three years later Handel and Scarlatti met in Rome in an organ and harpsichord competition, and while Handel won as organist, even Scarlatti declaring that he did not know that such playing existed, no decision was made as to which was the better harpsichord player. This contest seems to have caused no hard feelings for the two young men of the same age became devoted friends.
Scarlatti had a trick of crossing his hands in his compositions. Who does not remember with joy his first piece in which he had to cross his hands? But sad to relate as he grew old, he became so fat that he could no longer cross hands with comfort, so in the last compositions the crossing of hands is noticeably absent!
It is hard to know where an inspiration is next coming from, but wouldn’t you be surprised were you a composer, if your pet cat presented you with a perfectly good theme? This happened to Domenico Scarlatti! His cat walked across the keyboard, and the composer used his musical foot prints as the subject of a very fine fugue! Maybe Zez Confrey’s Kitten on the Keys is a descendant of this pussy’s piece.
The Scarlattis were the last of the great Italian instrumental composers. For two centuries Italy had been the generous dispenser of culture, and like an unselfish mother had sent her children out into the world to carry knowledge and works to all the nations of Europe. The sun of Italy’s greatness was setting just as it began to rise in Germany.
CHAPTER XVI
Opera in France—Lully and Rameau—Clavecin and Harpsichord Composers
We left French Opera in 1600 when Henry IV married Marie de’ Medici. Ballets which resembled the English masques had been performed when Baif and his friends had produced Le Ballet Comique de la Reine, but no real opera had yet been written in France. In 1645, Cardinal Mazarin, the powerful Italian prime minister of France, invited a company of Italian singers to give a performance of Peri’s Euridice in Paris. The French did not like the opera, as they said it sounded too much like plain song and airs from the cloister, and yet it led to Abbé Perrin’s writing a work in 1658 which he called the Pastoral, and for which a composer named Cambert wrote the music. The Pastoral was a very great success, and was repeated by order of Louis XIV, King of France. Ten years later, Louis gave Perrin and Cambert permission “to establish throughout the kingdom academies of opera, or representations with music in the French language after the manner of those in Italy.” Their next work, Pomone, was the first opera performed publicly in an opera house, built purposely in Paris for them. The opera was so enthusiastically received, that it ran nightly for eight months, and the crowds were so great, that the police had to be called out. This combination of poet and composer came to an end with Pomone, and a new man acquired the right to give opera in the new opera house. This man was Jean Baptiste Lully or in Italian, Giovanni Battista Lulli (1632–1687).
Lully the King’s Favorite
You may hear that the first famous opera writer of France had been a pastry cook or kitchen boy, but no matter how humble his start in life, he rose to the highest social position ever reached up to that time by a composer in France. He became a great favorite of Louis XIV, he was covered with titles and honors, he was on friendly terms with all the nobility of the court, he was musical dictator of the opera and in fact of all the musical happenings of the court. The greatest literary geniuses of the period, such as Molière, Racine, La Fontaine, Quinault, Corneille and Boileau, worked with him when he wanted new librettos for his operas. He paid dearly for all his privileges, because his fellow composers were jealous of his genius and his opportunities, and they lost no chance to blacken his character.
Lully was born in Florence, Italy, in 1632, but we can tell you little or nothing of his parentage or of his childhood. A monk taught him a little about music and how to play the guitar. When he was about twelve years old, he was picked up by the Duke de Guise who saw him with a group of traveling comedians, and was so attracted by his vivacity, his singing and talent for mimicry, that he took him back to Paris, where he placed him in the household of his cousin, Mlle. de Montpensier. In her memoirs, Mademoiselle said that she had been studying Italian and had asked her cousin to bring back from Tuscany where he lived, a little Italian garçon de la Chambre, a sort of personal errand boy. However, his guitar playing and musical gifts soon lifted him out of a servant’s position and he became one of the musicians of the great lady’s household playing at concerts, balls and in the ballets. He learned to play the violin, and soon began to compose popular dances. He remained a member of Mademoiselle’s household until he was nineteen when he asked permission to leave her service, as she had moved to the country, and he liked the gay life of Paris better.
He had no difficulty in attaching himself to the King’s court, first as actor and dancer in the ballets, and soon as “composer of instrumental music.” Louis XIV was only fourteen years old, and was evidently highly entertained by the capers of the young Italian who was willing to play any rôle, dance any kind of a dance, or play the violin “divinely” for his young monarch’s amusement. The King remained Lully’s faithful friend always. Louis loved music, and played the lute, the guitar, the harpsichord, and sang very well. Feeling that he needed to know more, Lully studied counterpoint, composition and learned to play the harpsichord, and whatever he attempted musically, he acquired without difficulty.
In 1656, Lully composed music for a scene in a ballet, Psyche, and from that time on, his compositions became the most popular of any at court. Although he was born an Italian, his music was French, and he even shared the French dislike of the Italian opera. In spite of his love of acting in the ballets, of dancing, and of courting social favor with the King and nobles, Lully was a thorough musician. When he went into music he found that few of the singers could read notes, but they learned their parts by ear. He soon changed this, and by the time he died, all singers and players of orchestral instruments could read well. In this reform, he did a great service to the growth of music.
His first stage works were called comedy-ballets. One of his early works was ballet music written for a performance of Cavalli’s opera, Xerxes, which was performed upon Mazarin’s invitation at Versailles (1660). He next was given the position of “Superintendent of Music,” became a naturalized French citizen, and was married. Lully wrote 19 ballets, 12 comedy-ballets, and 18 operas, besides about 23 motets for special occasions. His ballets included recitatives, airs, dialogues and symphonies, which was the name given to music written for orchestra. From 1672 until the time of his death in 1687, he wrote an opera a year, and sometimes two!
The splendor and extravagance of the costuming and stage settings of these ballets and operas of Lully are almost unbelievable! At times, even the orchestra wore costumes of the period represented on the stage. Lully conducted the orchestra for one opera in a magnificent Egyptian dress. Louis XIV loved these elaborate performances, and took part in some of them.
After the downfall of Perrin and Cambert, which many said was caused by Lully, he became absolute ruler in all musical matters. He used his power to close a rival opera house, and no opera could be given anywhere in France without his permission, for which he received a sum of money. He was such a tyrant that he had many enemies, some of whom tried to poison his snuff, in order to get rid of the King’s favorite.
“Le Roi Soleil” (The Sun King), as Louis XIV was called, had to be entertained, and Lully understood so well how to keep him amused, that the King could not get along without his composer whose performances dazzled all beholders!
You must read French history of that period in order to understand just how gorgeous and how extravagant life at the palace of Versailles was and how eventually it led to the revolt of the people and the French Revolution. Or perhaps you have seen the elaborate gardens, fountains and palace,—a playground built at fearful cost where the Kings of France might forget their cares! The King went so far as to give Lully a post of royal secretary, usually held by nobles. It is said that his only claim to the position was that he made people laugh!
In 1681, his ballet Triomphe de l’Amour (Triumph of Love) was given, in which, for the first time, women instead of men danced. Indeed, ladies of the nobility took part in the ballet!
The French Overture introduced by Lully, was in two parts or movements,—the first slow and serious, the second by way of contrast fast, and bringing in the contrapuntal style of the church composers; sometimes a third part resembling the first was added. These overtures were very much liked in Lully’s time and during the 18th century, and was the form used by the German composers in their orchestral suites and by Handel. Lully was very successful in composing military music, and his military marches were used not only by the French army, but by the armies marching against France. All of his music is simple and clear in outline, it is easy to remember, its rhythm is vigorous and definite, and the people, as well as musicians of his day, loved and understood it. One writer said that one of his songs from Amadis, an opera (1684), “was sung by every cook in France and Lully would stop his carriage on the Pont Neuf (the New Bridge across the Seine) to set some poor fiddler right who was playing one of his airs.” His works reached Italy, Germany, England, Holland and Flanders, and influenced many of the composers like Purcell, Humphrey and Handel to say nothing of the French composers who followed him.
Lully built up the orchestra, and used the different groups of instruments in entirely new ways.
Lully died in 1687 as the result of having dropped the stick with which he directed his orchestra on his foot. This does not sound possible, but the baton used in his time was very large and heavy, and the accident caused blood poisoning. He was very much missed, for there was no one with his talent for conducting and disciplining the singers and dancers to replace him.
Rameau
In 1683, was born another French composer who carried on the work that Lully had begun, a work so much loved by the French public, that Jean Philippe Rameau found as strong a rival in the dead Lully as his contemporaries had in the living. Rameau’s father was organist of a church at Dijon, and although the family was very poor, the father was determined to give his three children a musical education, and began to teach them before they could read. As a result of this early training little Jean Philippe, when he was only seven years old, could play at sight on the harpsichord any music put before him, and when he was sent to school, he was very unruly and sang out loud in class or scribbled music all over his papers instead of doing his lessons.
When he was eighteen, he went to Italy, but as he did not like the music, he left. He was always headstrong and self-willed, and this was one of the hasty decisions for which he was afterwards sorry. He traveled from place to place on this journey, playing his way as he went, on the organ in churches and the violin in a band of traveling musicians. In the south of France, old Provence, the home of the troubadours, he became organist at Clermont, and lived quietly for six years. Here he wrote his first pieces for clavecin (spinet) and three cantatas. (The cantata was a new form which came from Italy, and was a small opera to be sung in a drawing-room.) When Rameau grew tired of his work as organist at Clermont, he showed his discontent by playing as badly as he possibly could, by using untuneful organ-stops and by playing fearful discords. An attempt was made to shut him off but he paid no attention until a choir boy was sent to him with a message, whereupon he left the organ and walked out of the church. He finally succeeded in making the directors give him his release, but before many years he returned to his old post, and was taken back in spite of his disagreeable temper, and so proud was Clermont of its organist, that his chair is still kept and exhibited.
From Clermont he went to Paris where he studied with the organist Marchand, and read the old books of musical theory such as Zarlino’s, for Rameau during his career wrote five important books on musical theory and harmony. He was the first to establish definitely the classic principles of harmony, and to put them into a form that for many years was used by all students. You must remember that up to the 17th century, counterpoint was the chief study, but when Italian opera succeeded in breaking down the polyphonic habit, a new science had to be made to explain the new system of chords that had been gradually built up by the Italians and also by Luther and his chorals. This was the science of harmony, and Rameau’s Treatise of Music, containing the Principles of Composition (1722), was one of the first books of its kind.
Until Rameau was fifty, he was known as an organist, a teacher of composition and a writer of many charming works for harpsichord and clavecin. He married a young singer when he was 43, and the year after, he made the acquaintance of a wealthy patron of the arts, at whose house he met artists, literary men, princes and embassadors. Rameau taught his patron’s wife, and had the use of his organ and private orchestra. Here he first found himself among friends who understood and appreciated his talents; here he met the great French writer, Voltaire, and the Abbé Pellegrin, both of whom wrote librettos for his operas. There is a tale that the Abbé made the composer sign an agreement about payment for the use of his book but after hearing the first rehearsal he tore it up—so pleased was he with Rameau’s first opera, Hippolyte et Aricie (1733). Now Rameau met the jealousy of Lully’s followers, who tried to prevent the success of the work. They hissed it and wrote slighting verse about it:
If difficulties beauty show,
Then what a great man is Rameau.
If beauty, though, by chance should be
But nature’s own simplicity,
Then what a small man is Rameau!—
(Frederick H. Martens’ translation of A History of Music by Paul Landormy.)
It is curious how often a new style in music has been greeted with just such criticism and prejudice as the “Lullyists” showed for Rameau’s opera! They claimed that the work was not French, that he used strange chords, that his music was too difficult to be understood! In fact they said exactly the same things that are said today about new works which are different from what the public is used to hearing. Voltaire said that it takes a whole generation for the human ear to grow familiar with a new musical style!
His third opera, Castor and Pollux, in 1737, was his first real success. With this work, he became famous, and was regarded as France’s greatest composer. An English noble in Paris at the time stated “that although everyone was abusing Rameau’s ‘horrible’ work, yet it was impossible to get a seat at the opera.”
Although Rameau brought nothing new to opera, he was the step between the Lully traditions and the innovators who came with Gluck. The French composers today turn to him in their search for the direct road along which French music has traveled.
In spite of Rameau’s unfriendly reserved nature, he won fame by force of his genius. He was as unlike Lully as two men could possibly have been. Rameau accepted favors from no one, and was generous in his attitude towards his fellow composers. He talked very little and was not popular. However, he was at the height of his career, when a company of Italian singers arrived in Paris (1752), and played La Serva Padrona by Pergolesi. The fresh sparkling little opera took Paris by storm, and this was the beginning of a sharp fight known as the war of the buffoons (page [330]), which divided Paris into two factions,—those who stood by Lully and Rameau, and those who wanted to see French opera replaced by the new Italian comic opera.
“The charm of these light operas,” says Mary Hargrave in her little book, The Earlier French Musicians, “lay in the simplicity of their subjects, taken from scenes and persons in ordinary life, humorously treated. They came as a delightful relief after the stilted classical heroes and heroines, the threadbare episodes of gods and goddesses, the Greek and Roman warriors in tunics, with ribbons and helmets on powdered wigs, in short, all the artificial conventions of which people had at last grown unutterably weary.”
Even the court was divided: Louis XV was on the side of French music, but the Queen was for the Italian, and crowds gathered nightly at the opera near the royal boxes, which were known as the “King’s corner,” and the “Queen’s corner.” Word bombshells were thrown from one camp into the other, and sometimes these became real insults! Poor Rameau! First he was the butt of the Lullyists because he was too modern, and now storms of abuse were heaped on his head because he was too old-fashioned! Nevertheless, to the end of his life his operas were received with great enthusiasm, and on one occasion when the old man of eighty was seen hiding in the corner of a box during one of his operas, he was called out with storms of applause. He was always very shy about appearing in public, applause embarrassed him, and no doubt much of his disagreeableness was due to his being bashful.
Rameau looked upon his scientific studies as more important than his composing, and Bach, Handel and many other composers studied his theory work even when they were not great admirers of his compositions. We never hear his operas, but his lovely pieces for the harpsichord, many of which are out of his operas, are played in piano recitals and are unsurpassed as examples of the French dance suite. Following the fashion of his time, he gave his pieces amusing titles such as The Call of the Birds, The Hen, The Whirlwinds, The Egyptian.
A list of his works show that he wrote 26 operas, 2 cantatas, 5 books on theory, and 4 volumes of harpsichord music.
His death occurred in 1764, and all France mourned their “greatest composer” and for years held memorial services in his honor.
Piron, a French writer, said of him: “All his mind and all his soul were in his harpsichord and when he had closed that, the house was empty, there was no one at home.”
French Composers for Clavecin and Harpsichord
In every collection of French instrumental music of the 17th and 18th centuries, besides the names of Lully and Rameau, we find Jacques Champion de Chambonnières (1600–1670), Jean Baptiste Loeilly, or Loeillet (?–1728?), François Couperin (1668–1733), Jean François Dandrieu (1684–1740), Jean Louis Marchand (1669–1733), Louis Claude Daquin (1694–1772) and Schobert (1720–1768).
These writers for clavecin and harpsichord of the French school were the first to write music for instruments to which they gave names describing the nature of the compositions. So, now, in addition to the names of dances which formed the suites, we find The Coucou, Butterflies, Tambourine, The Windmill, The Turtle-Doves, and so on. This was an important step for it led directly to the kind of titles given to piano pieces in the 19th century by the German romantic school.
The most important of this group was François Couperin, called “the great,” as he was the most gifted member of a family, who supplied France with musicians for two centuries. From 1665 to 1826, there were eight Couperins who were organists of St. Gervais’ Church in Paris.
We can compare the Couperin family to the Bachs who flourished at the same time in Germany. François (1668–1733), was only a year old when his father died, but a friend, who was an organist, taught him and in time he, too, became organist at St. Gervais. He was harpsichord player to the King, and was a favorite in court circles. No fashionable affair was complete without Couperin at the harpsichord, and every Sunday evening he played chamber music for Louis XIV, the royal patron of Lully. One of the books of pieces for the clavecin was published under the title of Royal Concerts, and in the preface, Couperin told that they were written for “les petits concerts du roi” (the little concerts of the king), and he also said that he hoped the public would like the pieces as much as the King did. For twenty years Couperin played in the King’s household, and taught several princes and princesses.
You know the old proverb, “All roads lead to Rome.” We would change it, and say that all roads lead to Bach! And Couperin is one of the main highways, for without knowing that he was doing so, he prepared the way for Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Everything he wrote, and most of his pieces were in the dance form of the suite, was exquisite in refinement and taste. The French musicians of today look upon him as one of their composers, most truly French, and they try to follow in the way he led, so as to be able to write music that will express the French people, in heart and character. Later in the story of music, the German classic school and then the romantic school had a very strong influence on the music of every country in the world, and in France there was the desire to brush aside the outside influences, and to find the road that the early French composers of the 17th and 18th centuries had traveled. Paul Landormy, a French writer on musical history has summed up Couperin as “one of the miracles of the French spirit in music, and across the gulf of time he clasps hands on one side with Jannequin and Costeley (p. [437]), on the other with Fauré and Debussy” (p. [416]).
All the important music outside of opera written in France at this time was for the clavecin and harpsichord, and if the flute or the viol was invited to take part in a concert, it was only to double the melody played by the harpsichord, and did not have a part especially created for it.
Wouldn’t you be surprised today if you should see an announcement of a concert to be given by the President’s chauffeurs? But in the time of Couperin and Lully wind instruments were used in all the court festivals, balls and ballets, and were played by men attached to the great hunting stables of the king. The band was called la musique de la grande écurie du Roi (music of the King’s stables). There were twelve trumpets, eight fifes and drums, the cromornes (krumhorn—a curved reed instrument), four to six Poitou oboes and bagpipes, and twelve large oboes under which title were included violins, oboes, sackbuts and cornets. These players of wind instruments accompanied the royal hunting parties and made the beautiful forests of France ring with their merry music. Each family had its own hunting call, by which it was recognized from afar. We heard a phonograph record in Paris of these ancient calls, and with each one, the name of the family to whom it belonged was announced.
By the way, do you know the difference between a band and an orchestra? (This is not a conundrum!) A band was originally a group of musicians who played while standing or marching, while the orchestra was always seated. This word comes from the Greek word meaning dance, and was first given to a group of players who accompanied the dancers in the dramas, and were seated in that section of the theatre which is still called the orchestra.
CHAPTER XVII
Germany Enters—Organs, Organists and Organ Works
It is rather hard to believe that the largest of all instruments, the pipe organ, is a descendant of Pan’s Pipes, played by the shepherds on the hillsides of ancient Greece, is it not? The pipes of the church organ of today are of different lengths and are built on the same principle as were the pipes of Pan, our goat-footed friend, who broke off the reeds by the bank of a stream way back when the world was young, to pour out his grief in music for his lost love, Syrinx.
The next step was to supply the organ pipes with wind so they could be made to produce tones without blowing on each one separately. A wooden box was invented, and each pipe inserted into a hole in the top of the box, which is still called the wind-chest. At first this was supplied with air by two attendants who blew into tubes attached to the wind-chest. Soon the tubes were replaced by bellows, and were worked with the arms, and as the instrument grew larger, with the feet like in a treadmill. An organ is spoken of in the Talmud as having stood in the Temple of Jerusalem, and the hydraulic (water) organ in which air was supplied to the pipes by means of water power was built in Alexandria, Egypt, about the year 250 B.C. The small organ with keys that could be carried from place to place was called a portative (from the Latin porto—to carry); the larger organ sometimes stationary and sometimes moved on wheels was called a positive. The levers needed to produce the sound were soon exchanged for keyboards which at first had only a few keys, and you may remember our telling how the keys were pounded with the fists and elbows, in the Winchester organ.
A Greek writer of the 4th century A.D. gives us a vivid description of an organ: “I see a strange sort of reeds—they must methinks have sprung from no earthly, but a brazen soil. Wild are they, nor does the breath of man stir them, but a blast, leaping forth from a cavern of oxhide, passes within, beneath the roots of the polished reeds.”
It is not known just when the organ was first used in the churches, but there are records of its having been known in Spanish churches as early as the 5th century A.D. Pope Vitalian introduced it in Rome in 666, and in the 8th century in England, organ-building became a very popular profession. Cecil Forsyth says: “In those days a monk or bishop who wished to stand well with society could not take up essay-writing or social-welfare: what he could do was to lay hands on all the available timber, metal, and leather, and start organ-building.”
Pepin, the father of Charlemagne, imported an organ into Compiègne, France, from Byzantium in the 8th century. Charlemagne had it copied at Aix-la-Chapelle. The Arabians must have been organ-builders, too, for one of their most famous rulers, Haroun-al-Raschid, sent Charlemagne a pneumatic organ noted for its soft tone. The instruments made in Germany and France up to the 10th century were small and unpretending, but were objects of astonishment and curiosity.
In Magdeburg, in the 11th century, we find the first keyboard with keys 3 inches broad. In 1120, we hear of an organ in the Netherlands that had 2 manuals (keyboards) and pedals. Organ-building was growing up! In the 14th century the manuals of many organs had 31 keys.
The organ was not always accepted in the church, for in the 13th century its use was regarded as scandalous just as the English Puritans in the 17th century called it a “squeaking abomination,” and it is not even now admitted in the Greek Catholic Church!
Until the 14th century, the organ had been used only in a most primitive way to guide the singers of plain-song. It became a solo instrument when it was possible to grade its tone from soft to loud, which was done by the invention and use of three manuals: the upper one played “full organ” (very loud); the middle, the discant (softest), played a counterpoint to the subject; the subject was played on the lowest keyboard.
So we see how one invention led to another until the organ became an instrument of almost unlimited possibilities, and how keyed instruments had shown the composers how to develop music along new lines. By the end of the 16th century, organ compositions and organ-playing had made rapid progress all over Europe, and you will recall the great organists in all the churches and cathedrals in the Netherlands, in England, Italy, France, Spain, and even in Germany which up to this time had not been on the “musical map.” (Chapter XI).
Are you wondering why we have gone back into “ancient history” at this point, or have you already discovered that these grand old organists are leading us directly Bach-ward?
Frescobaldi
Just a century before Bach’s time, the greatest of all Italian organists, Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583–1644), was born at Ferrara, Italy. So popular was he, that he filled the vast Cathedral of St. Peter’s, whenever he played. His compositions were the most important produced for organ in the early 17th century, and his fugues were the first to be treated in modern fashion, in form, fancy, and feeling for tone color, and were a foundation on which Bach’s were built. His compositions include canzones, toccatas, ricercari, and numerous pieces in the popular dance forms. Most of these are found in two collections published for cembalo e organo (spinet and organ). He was not interested in opera, but went his own musical way expressing himself in an original and individual language far ahead of his period. With Frescobaldi, Italy ceased to be the world’s center for organists.
German Organists
At this point, Germany came into the musical field, and soon became the artistic center of organ-playing. Up to this time, the country had produced less music than any of its neighbors: Italy had written the greatest Church music, and invented opera; France had followed closely in Italy’s footsteps; the Low Countries had helped in music’s growth by their early work in polyphony and had taught all Europe including Germany; England had led the world in her compositions for virginals and harpsichord, the forerunners of piano music. Although Germany did not at first rank musically with these countries, the religious fervor and devotion to the cause of Protestantism bore fruit in the grand chorales of Luther. In these we find the birth of German music destined to rule the world for two centuries, the 18th and the 19th, just as the Italian had in the 16th and the 17th. The religious inspiration, the direct simplicity and sincerity of the chorales are the qualities found in the works of the first great German composer, Johann Sebastian Bach!
The religious wars of the first half of the 17th century crushed almost all the music out of Germany. In the second half, the organists became the leaders, and their music for organ inspired by the chorale was the first real contribution that Germany made to the growth of music.
One of the earliest of these German organists was Johann Jacob Froberger (1605–1667), of Saxony, who was a pupil of Frescobaldi, and court organist at Vienna. He went to London (1662), and as he was robbed on the way, he arrived penniless. He found work as organ-blower at Westminster Abbey. On the occasion of Charles II’s marriage, he overblew the bellows and interrupted the playing, which so enraged the organist Christopher Gibbons, son of Orlando, that he struck him. Poor Froberger! But he had a chance to redeem himself, for he sat down to the organ a few moments later, and started to improvise in a manner for which he was famous in Vienna. A former pupil of his, recognizing his style, was overjoyed to find him, and presented him to the King. He was invited to play on the harpsichord which he did to the astonishment of every one.
A Dutch organist, Johann Adam Reinken (1623–1722) and a Dane, Dietrich Buxtehude (1637–1707) belong to this school, as they lived in Germany most of their lives and worked along the lines the Germans were developing. Reinken was a pupil of Frescobaldi; he had a direct influence on Bach who often walked from Lüneburg to Hamburg to hear the far-famed organist. When Reinken was 99 years old he heard Bach improvise on his Chorale “By the Waters of Babylon,” which drew from him the praise, “I thought that this art was dead, but I see that it still lives in you.”
Absolute Music
It is very probable that had Buxtehude not lived, Bach would have written his organ works in a different style, so deeply did the younger composer study the older man’s compositions. Buxtehude was organist in Lüneburg and there he started a series of concerts which became so popular that they were continued into the 19th century. Bach walked fifty miles to hear Buxtehude play, but was too shy to make himself known to the great man; it was probably to hear one of the concerts which had the poetic name of Abendmusik (Evening Music), that he went. Buxtehude was one of the first to try to make instrumental music stand as music (a language in itself), without a dance form, a plain-song or chorale or poetic idea behind it, to act as a Biblical text does in a sermon. This music for music’s sake is called “Absolute Music” and Bach was one of its strongest disciples. Absolute music, which was so beautifully handled by Buxtehude, became the basis of the Classic School of the 18th and early 19th centuries.
The organ chorale prelude which was so important a musical form during this period had a very interesting history. Today the organist in our churches plays the hymn through before it is sung; he plays it quite simply just as it is written in the Hymnal, but in the day of these old German organists, the artistic feeling was deeper, and the organist was allowed to weave the chorale or hymn into a beautiful and complete composition. But in his love of composing and of showing how many different ways he could decorate the chorale, he often exceeded his time limit, and the chorale prelude was left behind. In its place the organ fantasia and the sonata appeared.
Johann Pachelbel (1653–1706), of Nüremberg, was a pupil of another celebrated director and organist, Johann Kaspar Kerl (1628–1693), who was said to be one of the best teachers of composition of his day. There were also three German organists born late in the 16th century, all of whom were followers of the famous Dutch composer Jan Sweelinck. They were known as the “three S’s”—Heinrich Schütz was the greatest of them. He wrote organ music, but also worked out a scheme for combining the chorale with the ideas of Peri and Caccini for use with Bible texts in the Lutheran Church. This was called Passion music and was originally written for Good Friday. On this foundation Bach built some of his grandest oratorios. The Italian influence came into Schütz’s work while he was a pupil of Gabrieli in Venice. Johann Heinrich Schein was a Cantor at St. Thomas’ School before Bach, and wrote many chorales. The third of the “three S’s” was Samuel Scheidt who was called the German Frescobaldi. “What plain-song was to Palestrina and his school, the chorale was to Schütz and his followers.” (Quoted from Charles Villiers Stanford.)
The Inventor of the Sonata and of “Program Music”
Johann Kuhnau (1660–1722), wrote many compositions which today we find very amusing! For his day, however, he must have been looked upon as ultra-modern! The composition which first brought him into public notice was a motet, written for the election of the town council. Could you imagine anyone writing a serious composition for an election today, or anyone willing to listen to it at the polls? He was organist of St. Thomas’, in Leipsic, a graduated lawyer, master of several languages, writer of satirical poems, musical director of the University, and finally Cantor in two Churches. He was admired and honored after his death as one of the greatest musicians of his day and one of the most learned men. He invented a style of music for the clavier which he called Sonata. It was in several movements and was not based on dance tunes as were the suites. While it was not in the form that later was known as sonata-form, it was a sign-post pointing the way. Seven of these sonatas he named Fresh Clavier Fruit! And it was fresh in style as well as in name.
He was the first German composer to write “program music,” that is the kind which tries to tell a story, or to imitate the actual sounds of natural objects, such as the crash of thunder, the motion of a windmill, the rocking of a cradle, and the cackling of a hen. You can see how long a list one might make and how easy it would be for anyone with a vivid imagination to make up all sorts of pictures in music. This is just the opposite from music for music’s sake which we described to you as “Absolute Music,” and most of it which follows this period when music comes of age can be put into one of the two camps,—the Program Music Camp, or the Absolute Music Camp.
Kuhnau’s program music took a queer turn! He was living at a time when religion was uppermost in every one’s thoughts, when the Bible stories were bedtime stories and when the leading compositions were the sonatas written for organ. So in 1700 he published six Biblical-history Sonatas. In David and Goliath, he attempts to put into music the rude defiance and bravado of the giant; the fear of the Hebrews; David’s courage and fearlessness, and the battle and fall of the giant; the flight of the Philistines (can’t you imagine how the composer would represent this with all kinds of runs and scales?); the joy of the Hebrews; the celebration of the women who probably came out to meet David “with timbrels and harps”; and general jubilation.
At the end of the 17th century, Germany was strongly under the influence of France and Italy, especially in opera. In Dresden, Berlin, Munich and Vienna, one heard only opera in Italian sung by Italian singers, but Hamburg tried to develop a national music by giving German opera sung by German singers, and attracted many serious musicians. Johann Mattheson (1681–1764) a singer, conductor and composer, is remembered chiefly for a book called A German Roll of Honor, in which he gathered up all the information he could find about German composers up to his time. He asked all the living composers to write accounts of themselves for his book, so we take it for granted that it must be truthful!
Music had changed more in the 17th century than in any that had gone before. If we tried to sum it all up in one word we should say that it was a century of transition or the passage from one condition to another. It began with the old Ecclesiastical, or Church, modes, and ended with the major and minor scales which we still use today; the reign of counterpoint was over, and now had to share the throne on equal terms with harmony.
Sonata-Form
The dominating musical form after Bach’s time was to be the Sonata, a name we have often used. The sonata which found its champions in Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, was the child of the sonata written by D. Scarlatti, Kuhnau, and Bach and his sons. It is built on the principle of contrast as were the suites. A sonata is a collection of three or four related pieces called movements: one, fast—one, slow—then fast. If in four movements, the first is moderately fast; the second, very slow; the third, fast (scherzo); the fourth fast (usually rondo form).
Sonata-form is the name given to the first movement of a sonata, a string quartet, trio, quintet, etc., concerto or a symphony. It has two main themes which are announced, then developed and then re-announced, forming three contrasting sections or panels: Statement or Exposition, Development, and Restatement. From now on, when we speak of sonata-form, this picture should come to you.
The stage is now all set for Bach and those who came after him.