I
Modern history—the history of modern art and modern thought, as well as that of modern politics—dates from July 14, 1789, the capture of the Bastille at the hands of the Parisian mob. Carlyle says there is only one other real date in all history, and that is one without a date, lost in the mists of legends—the Trojan war. There is no political event, no war or rumor of war among the European nations of to-day which, when traced to its source, does not somehow flow from that howling rabble which sweated and cursed all day long before the prison—symbol of absolute artistocratic power—overpowered the handful of guards which defended it and made known to the king, through his minister, its message: ‘Sire, this is not an insurrection; it is a revolution!’
For a century and a quarter the mob of July 14th has stood like a wall between the Middle Ages and modern times. No less than modern politics, modern thought and all its artistic expression date from 1789. For, against the authority of hereditary rules and rulers, the mob of the Bastille proclaimed another authority, namely that of facts. The notion that forms should square with facts and not facts with forms then became the basis of men’s thinking. This truth had existed as a theory in the minds of individual thinkers for many decades—even for many centuries. But the Parisian mob first revealed the truth of it by enacting it as a fact. From that fact the truth spread among men’s minds, forcing them, according to their lights, to bring all forms and authorities to the test of facts. Babies, who were to be the next generation’s great men, were brought up in this kind of thought and were subtly inoculated with it so that their later thinking was based upon it, whether they would or no. And so men have come to ask of a monarch, not whether he is a legitimate son of his house, but whether he derives his authority from the will of the nation. They have come to ask of a philosophy, not whether it is consistent, but whether it is true. And they have come to ask of an art-form, not whether it is perfect, but whether it is fitting to its subject-matter.
When we come to compare the music of the nineteenth century with that of the century preceding we find a contrast as striking as that between the state of Europe as Napoleon left it with that as he found it. The Europe of the eighteenth century was for the most part a conglomeration of petty states, without national feeling, without standing armies in the modern sense—states which their princes ruled as private property for the supplying of their personal wants, with power of life and death over their subjects; states whose soldiers ran away after the second volley and whose warfare was little more than a formal and rather stupid chess game; states whose statesmanship was the merest personal intrigue of favorites. Among these states a few half-trained mobs of revolutionary armies spread terror, and the young Napoleon amazed them by demonstrating that soldiers who had their hearts in a great cause could outfight those who had not.
So, in contrast to the crystal clear symphonies of the eighteenth century and the vocal roulades and delicate clavichord suites, we find in the nineteenth huge orchestral works, grandiose operas, the shattering of established forms, an astonishing increase in the size of the orchestra and the complexity of its parts, the association of music with high poetic ideas, and the utter rejection of most of the prevailing harmonic rules. And with this extension of scope there came a profound deepening in content, as much more profound and human as the Parisian mob’s notion of society was more profound and human than that of Louis XVI. The revolution and the Napoleonic age, which had been periods of dazzling personal glory, in which individual ability and will power became effective as never before, had stimulated the egotistic impulses of the nineteenth century. People came to feel that a thing could perhaps be good merely because they wanted it. Hence the personal and emotional notes sound in the music of the nineteenth century as they never sounded before. The sentimental musings of Chopin, the intense emotional expression of Schumann’s songs, the wild and willful iconoclasm of Berlioz’s symphonies were personal in the highest degree. And, as the complement to this individual expression, there dawned a certain folk or mob-expression, for the post-Napoleonic age was also an age of national awakening. The feeling of men that they are part of a group of human beings rather than of a remote empire is the feeling which we have in primitive literature, in the epics and fairy stories, the ballads and folk epics. This folk-feeling came to brilliant expression in Liszt’s Hungarian rhapsodies, and the deep heroic note sounds quite as grandly in his symphonic poems. Music took on a power, by the aid of subtle suggestion, of evoking physical images; and, in deeper sincerity, it achieved something like accurate depiction of the emotions. A thousand shades of expression, never dreamed of before, were brought into the art. Men’s ears became more delicate, in that they distinguished nuance of tone and phrase, and particularly the individual qualities of various instruments, as never before; it was the great age of the pianoforte, in which the instrument was dowered with a musical literature of its own, comparable in range and beauty with that of the orchestra. The instruments of the orchestra, too, were cultivated with attention to their peculiar powers, and the potentialities of orchestral expression were multiplied many times over.
It was the great age of subdivision into schools and of the development of national expression. The differences between German, French, and Italian music in the eighteenth century are little more than matters of taste and emphasis—variations from one stock. But the national schools which developed during the romantic period differ utterly in their musical material and treatment.
It was the golden age of virtuosity. The technical facility of such men as Kalkbrenner and Czerny came to dazzling fruition in Liszt and Paganini, whose concert tours were triumphal journeys and whose names were on people’s lips like those of great national conquerors. This virtuosity took hold of people’s imaginations; Liszt and Paganini became, even during their lifetimes, glittering miracular legends. Their exploits were, during the third and fourth decades of the century, the substitute for those of Napoleon in the first fifteen years. Their exploits expanded with the growing interrelation of modern life. The great growth of newspaper circulation in the Napoleonic age, and the spread of railroads through the continent in the thirties, increased many times the glory and extent of the virtuoso’s great deeds.
But the travelling virtuoso was a symbol of a far more important fact. For in this age musicians began to break away entirely from the personal patron; they appealed, for their justification and support, from the prince to the people. The name of a great musician was, thanks to the means of communication, spread broadcast among men, and there was something like an adequate living to be made by a composer-pianist from his concerts and the sale of his compositions. From the time of the revolution on it was the French state, with its Conservatory and its theatres, not the French court, which was the chief patron of the arts. And from Napoleonic times on it was the people at large, or at least the more cultured part of them, whose approval the artist sought. In all essentials, from the fall of Napoleon onward, it was a modern world in which the musician found himself.
But it is evident that we cannot get along far in this examination of romantic music without reviewing the outward social history of the time. It is a time of colors we can never discover from a mere observation of outward facts and dates, for it is a time of complexities of superficial intrigue likely to obscure its meaning. We must, therefore, see the period, not as most historians give it to us, but as a movement of great masses of people and of the growing ideas which directed their actions. Royal courts and popular assemblies were not the real facts, but only the clearing houses for the real facts. The balances, on one or the other side of the ledger, which they showed bear only the roughest kind of relation to the truth.
It is well to skeleton this period with five dates. The first is the one already met, 1789. The next is the assumption of the consulate by Napoleon in 1799, which was practically the beginning of the empire. The next is the fall of Napoleon, which we may place in 1814, after the battle of Leipzig, or in 1815, after Waterloo, as we prefer. The next is 1830, when, after conservative reaction throughout Europe, the mobs in most of the great capitals raised insurrections, and in some cases overthrew governments and obtained some measure of constitutional law. And the last is 1848, when these popular outbreaks recurred in still more serious form, and with a proletarian consciousness that made this revolution the precursor of the twentieth century as certainly as 1789 was the precursor of the nineteenth.
We cannot here give the details of the mighty and prolonged struggle—we shall only recall to the reader the astounding sequence of cataclysms and exploits that shook Europe; roused its consciousness strata by strata; remodelled its face, its thought, its ideals, its laws, and its arts. Paris was the nervous centre of this upheaval, the stage upon which the most conspicuous acts were paraded; but every blow struck in that arena reëchoed, multiplied, throughout Europe, just as every wave of the turmoil originating in any part of Europe recorded itself upon the seismograph of Paris. From the tyranny and unthinking submission of before 1789 we pass to a period of constitutional tolerance of the monarchical form; thence to the aggressive propaganda for republican principles and the terror; thence to the personal exploits of a popular hero, arousing wonder and admiration while imposing a new sort of tyranny. Stimulated imaginations now give birth to new enthusiasms, stir up the feelings of national unity and pride; to consciousness of nationality succeeds consciousness of class—reactions and restorations bring new revolutions, successful mobs impose terms on submissive monarchs, at Paris in 1833 as at Berlin in 1848; then finally follows the communist manifesto. France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, even England, were convulsed with this glorious upheaval; and not kings and soldiers alone, but men of peaceful moods—workingmen, men of professions, poets, artists, musicians—were borne into this whirlpool of politics. Musicians of the eighteenth century had no thoughts but of their art; those of the nineteenth were national enthusiasts, celebrants of contemporary heroes, political philosophers, propagandists, and agitators. What wonder? Since the days of Julius Cæsar had there been any concrete events to take hold of men’s imaginations as these did? They set all men ‘thinking big.’ If the difference between a Haydn symphony of 1790 and Beethoven’s Ninth of 1826 is the difference between a toy shop and the open world, is not the cause to be found mainly in these battles of the nations? Not only Beethoven—Berlioz, Chopin, Liszt, and Wagner, the political exile, were affected by the successive events of 1789 to 1848. As proof of how closely musical history coincides with the revolution wrought by these momentous years, let us recall that Beethoven, the real source of romantic music, lived at the time of Napoleon and by the Eroica symphony actually touches Napoleon; and that by the year 1848, which is the last of those dates which we have chosen as the historic outline of the romantic movement in music, Schubert and Weber were long dead, Mendelssohn was dead, Chopin was almost on his deathbed, Schumann was drifting toward the end, Berlioz was weary of life, and Liszt was working quietly at Weimar, which had been for years one of the most liberal spots in Germany. And, as if Wagner’s dreams of a mighty national music attended the realization of the dream of all Germany, the foundation stone of the national theatre at Bayreuth was laid hardly a year after the unity of the German empire was declared at Versailles in 1871.
How shall we characterize the music of this period? In musical terms it is almost impossible to characterize it as a whole, for the steady stream of tradition had broken up violently into a multitude of forms and styles, and these must be characterized one by one as they come under our consideration. As a whole, it must be characterized in broader terms. For the assertion of the Parisian mob was at the bottom of it all. Previously men’s imaginations had been bounded by the traditional types; they took it for granted that they must contain themselves within the limitations to which they had been born. But since a dirty rabble had overturned the power of the Bourbons, and an obscure Corsican had married into the house of Hapsburg, men realized that nothing is impossible; limitations are made only to be broken down. The intellectual giant of the age had brought this realization to supreme literary expression in ‘Faust,’ the epic of the man who would include within himself all truth and all experience. And, whereas the ideal of the previous age had been to work within limits and so become perfect, the ideal of this latter age was to work without limits and so become great. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century this sense of freedom to achieve the impossible was the presiding genius of music.
And with it, as a corollary to it, came one thing more, a thing which is the second great message of Goethe’s ‘Faust’—the idea that truth must be personally experienced, that while it is abstract it is non-existent. Faust could not know love except by being young and falling in love. He could not achieve his redemption by understanding the beauty of service; he must redeem himself by actually serving his fellowmen. And so in the nineteenth century men came to feel that beautiful music cannot be merely contemplated and admired, but must be lived with and felt. Accordingly composers of this period emphasized continually the sensuous in their music, developing orchestral colors, dazzling masses of tone, intense harmonies and biting dissonances, delicate half-lights of modulation, and the deep magic of human song. The change in attitude from music as a thing to be admired to music as a thing to be felt is perhaps the chief musical fact of the early nineteenth century.