VII
In spite of Beethoven’s own assertion that his work is not meant to be ‘program music,’ his name will no doubt always be connected with that special phase of modern art. We have seen how distinctly he grasped the true principles of program or delineative music in his words, Mehr Ausdruck der Empfindung als Malerei (the expression of feeling, not a painting); never an imitation, but a reproduction of the effect. More than any musician of his own or earlier times was he able to saturate his composition with the mood which prompted it. For this reason the whole world sees pictures in his sonatas and reads stories into his symphonies, as it has not done with the work of Haydn, Emanuel Bach, or Mozart. With the last-named composer it was sufficient to bring all the devices of art—balance, light and shade, contrast, repetition, surprise—to the perfection of an artistic ensemble, with a result which satisfies the æsthetic demands of the most fastidious. Beethoven’s achievement was art plus mood or emotion; therefore the popular habit of calling the favorite sonata in C sharp minor the ‘Moonlight Sonata,’ unscholarly though it may be, is striking witness to one of the most fundamental of Beethoven’s qualities—the power by which he imbued a given composition with a certain mood recognizable at once by imaginative minds. The aim at realism, however, is only apparent. That he is not a ‘programmist,’ in the accepted sense, is evident from the fact that he gave descriptive names to only the two symphonies, the Eroica and Pastoral. He does not tell a story, he produces a feeling, an impression. His work is the notable embodiment of Schopenhauer’s idea: ‘Music is not a representation of the world, but an immediate voice of the world.’ Unlike the artist who complained that he disliked working out of doors because Nature ‘put him out,’ Beethoven was most himself when Nature spoke through him. This is the new element in music which was to germinate so variously in the music drama, tone poems and the like of the romantic writers of the nineteenth century.
In judging his operatic work, it has seemed to critics that Beethoven remained almost insensible to the requirements and limitations of a vocal style and was impatient of the restraints necessarily imposed upon all writing for the stage; with the result that his work spread out into something neither exactly dramatic nor oratorical. In spite of the obvious greatness of Fidelio, these charges have some validity. With his two masses, again, he went far beyond the boundaries allotted by circumstance to any ecclesiastical production and arrived at something like a ‘shapeless oratorio.’ His variations, also, so far exceed the limit of form usually maintained by this species of composition that they are scarcely to be classed with those of any other composer. For the pianoforte, solo and in connection with other instruments, there are twenty-nine sets of this species of music, besides many brilliant instances of its use in larger works, such as the slow movement in the ‘Appassionata,’ and the slow movements of the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies. Sometimes he keeps the melody unchanged, weaving a varied accompaniment above, below, or around it; again he preserves the harmonic basis and embellishes the melody itself, these being types of variation well known also to other composers. Another method, however, peculiar to himself, is to subject each part—melody, rhythm, and harmony—to an interesting change, and yet with such skill and art that the individual theme still remains clearly recognizable. ‘In no other form than that of the variation,’ remarks Dannreuther, ‘does Beethoven’s creative power appear more wonderful and its effect on the art more difficult to measure.’
It is, however, primarily as symphonist and sonata writer that Beethoven stands preëminent. At the risk of another repetition we must again say that with Beethoven’s treatment the sonata form assumes a new aspect, in that it serves as the golden bowl into which the intensity of his thought is poured, rather than the limiting framework of his art. He was disdainful of the attitude of the Viennese public which caused the virtuoso often to be confused with the artist. Brilliant passages were to him merely so much bombast and fury, unless there was a thought sufficiently intense to justify the extra vigor; and to him cleverness of fingers could not disguise emptiness of soul. ‘Such is the vital germ from which spring the real peculiarities and individualities of Beethoven’s instrumental compositions. It must now be a form of spirit as well as a form of the framework; it is to become internal as well as external.’ A musical movement in Beethoven is a continuous and complete poem; an organism which is gradually unfolded before us, rarely weakened by the purely conventional passages which were part of the form of his predecessors.
It must be noted, however, that Beethoven’s subtle modifications in regard to form were possible only because Mozart and Haydn had so well prepared the way by their very insistence upon the exact divisions of any given piece. Audiences of that day enjoyed the well-defined structure, which enabled them to follow and know just where they were. Perhaps for that very reason they sooner grew tired of the obviously constructed piece, but in any case they were educated to a familiarity with form, and were habituated to the effort of following its general outlines. Beethoven profited by this circumstance, taking liberties, especially in his pianoforte compositions, which would have caused mental confusion and bewilderment to earlier audiences, but were understood and accepted with delight by his own. His mastery of musical design and logical accuracy enabled him so to express himself as to be universally understood. He demonstrated both the supremacy and the elasticity of the sonata form, taking his mechanism from the eighteenth century, and in return bequeathing a new style to the nineteenth—a style which separated the later school of Vienna from any that had preceded it, spread rapidly over Europe, and exercised its authority upon every succeeding composer.
His great service was twofold: to free the art from formalism and spirit-killing laws; and to lift it beyond the level of fashionable taste. In this service he typifies that spirit which, in the persons of Wordsworth, Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe, has rescued literary art from similar deadening influences. Wagner expressed this feeling when he said, ‘For inasmuch as he elevated music, conformably to its utmost nature, out of its degradation as a merely diverting art to the height of its sublime calling, he has opened to us the understanding of that art in which the world explains itself.’ Herein lies his true relation to the world of art and the secret of his greatness; for almost unchallenged he takes the supreme place in the realm of pure instrumental music. His power is that of intellect combined with greatness of character. ‘He loves love rather than any of the images of love. He loves nature with the same, or even a more constant, passion. He loves God, whom he cannot name, whom he worships in no church built with hands, with an equal rapture. Virtue appears to him with the same loveliness as beauty.... There are times when he despairs for himself, never for the world. Law, order, a faultless celestial music, alone exist for him; and these he believed to have been settled before time was, in the heavens. Thus his music was neither revolt nor melancholy,’ and it is this, the noblest expression of a strange and otherwise inarticulate soul, which lives for the eternal glory of the art of music.
F. B.
FOOTNOTES:
[50] Edward Dickinson: ‘The Study of the History of Music.’
[51] Dichtung und Wahrheit.
[52] Thayer, Vol. I, p. 227.
[53] Nottebohm: Beethoveniana, XXVII.
[54] Arthur Symons, Essay ‘Beethoven.’
[55] Grove: ‘Beethoven and His Nine Symphonies,’ pp. 55-56.
[56] Berlioz: Étude critique des symphonies de Beethoven.
[57] Arthur Symons, Essay ‘Beethoven.’
[58] Thayer: Vol. II, p. 10.
[59] Muzio Clementi (1752-1832) is now remembered chiefly by his technical studies for the pianoforte, though a much greater portion of his work deserves recognition. He was a great concert pianist, a rival of whom Mozart was a little unwilling to admit the ability. A great part of his life was spent in England. He composed a great amount of music for the pianoforte which has little by little been displaced by that of Mozart; and in his own lifetime symphonies which once were hailed with acclaim fell into neglect before Haydn’s. His pianoforte works expanded keyboard technique, especially in the direction of double notes and octaves, and were the first distinctly pianoforte works in distinction to works for the harpsichord.
[60] Wagner, Essay ‘Beethoven.’
[61] ‘Oxford History of Music,’ Vol. V.
[62] Grove, Vol. I, p. 204.
[63] Arthur Symons, Essay ‘Beethoven.’
[64] Dannreuther, ‘Beethoven,’ Macmillan’s Magazine, July, 1876.
[65] Richard Wagner, Essay ‘Beethoven.’
CHAPTER V
OPERATIC DEVELOPMENT IN ITALY AND FRANCE
Italian opera at the advent of Rossini—Rossini and the Italian operatic renaissance; Guillaume Tell—Donizetti and Bellini—Spontini and the historical opera—Meyerbeer’s life and works—His influence and followers—Development of opéra comique; Auber, Hérold, Adam.
Operatic development in Italy and France during the first half of the nineteenth century represents, broadly speaking, the development of the romantic ideal by Rossini and Meyerbeer; a breaking away from classic and traditional forms; and the growth of individual freedom in musical expression. Rossini, as shown by subsequent detailed consideration of his works and the reforms they introduced, overthrows the time-honored operatic conventions of his day and breathes new life into Italian dramatic art. Spontini, ‘the last great classicist of the lyric stage,’ nevertheless forecasts French grand opera in his extensive historical scores. And French grand opera (as will be shown) is established as a definite type, and given shape and coherence by Rossini in Tell, by Meyerbeer in Robert, Les Huguenots, Le Prophète, and l’Africaine.
In this period the classical movement, interpreting in a manner the general trend of musical feeling in the eighteenth century, merges into the romantic movement, expressing that of the nineteenth. A widespread, independent rather than interdependent, musical activity in many directions at one and the same time explains such apparent contradictions as Beethoven and Rossini, Schubert, Cherubini, Spontini, Weber and Meyerbeer, all creating simultaneously. To understand the operatic reforms of Rossini and their later development a résumé of the leading characteristics of the Italian opera of his day is necessary.
As is usually the case when an art-form has in the course of time crystallized into conventional formulas, a revolution of some sort was imminent in Italian opera at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In France Gluck had already banished from his scores the dreary recitativo secco, and extended the use of the chorus. The opéra comique had come to stay, finding its most notable exponents in Grétry, Méhul, and Boieldieu. Cherubini’s nobly classic but cold and formal scores gave enjoyment to a capital which has at nearly all times been independent and self-sufficient. Mozart, in Zauberflöte, had already unlocked for Germany the sacred treasures of national art, and Weber,[66] following the general trend of German poetry and fiction, had inaugurated the romantic opera, a musical complement of the romantic literary movement, to which he gave its finest and fullest expression. Utilizing fairy tale and legend, he had secured for opera ‘a wider stage and an ampler air,’ and no longer relegating the beauties of Nature to the background, but treating them as an integral part of his artistic scheme, he laid the foundation upon which was eventually to rise the modern lyric drama.
But in Italy, beyond innate refinement of thought and grace of style, the composers whose names are identified with what was best in opera during the closing years of the eighteenth century had nothing to say. Cimarosa, Paesiello, Piccini (the one-time rival of Gluck) were prolific writers of the sort of melodious opera which had once delighted all Europe and still enchanted the opera-mad populace of Naples, Florence, Rome, and Venice. They had need to be prolific at a time when, as Burney says, an opera already heard was ‘like a last year’s almanac,’ and when Venice alone could boast thirteen opera houses, public and private. Each had to compose unremittingly, sometimes three or even four operas a year, and it is hardly surprising that their works, for all their charm, were thin and conventional in orchestration, and had but scant variety of melodic line. The development of the symphonic forms of aria and ensemble by Mozart, the enlargement of the orchestra, and the exaggerated fondness for virtuoso singing encouraged these defects, and gave these Italian composers ‘prosaically golden opportunities of lifting spectators and singers to the seventh heaven of flattered vanity.’ There was little or no connection between the music and its drama. Speaking generally, the operatic ideals of Italy were those of old Galuppi, who, when asked to define good music, replied: ‘Vaghezza, chiarezza e buona modulazione’ (vagueness, tenderness, and good modulation).
With all its faults the music of these eighteenth century masters excelled in a certain gracious suavity. Cimarosa, Paesiello and their contemporaries represent the perfection of the older Italian opera buffa, the classical Italian comic opera with secco-recitative, developed by Logroscino, Pergolesi, and Jommelli, a form which then reigned triumphant in all the large capitals of Europe. In the more artificial opera seria as well Cimarosa and Paesiello in particular achieved notable successes, and their works are the link which connects Italian opera with the most glorious period the lyric drama has known since the elevation of both Italian and German schools. But the criticism of the Abbé Arnaud, who said, ‘These operas, for which their drama is only a pretext, are nothing but concerts,’ is altogether just.
The reforms of Gluck and the romantic movement in Germany in no wise disturbed the trend of Italian operatic composition. Weber’s influence was negligible, for Italian operatic composers were, as a rule, indifferent to what was going on, musically, outside their own land. Those who, like Francesco Morlacchi (1784-1841) or the Bavarian Simon Mayr (1763-1845), were brought into contact with Weber or his works, showed their indebtedness to him rather in their endeavors to secure broader and more interesting harmonic development of their melodies and greater orchestral color than in any direct working out of his ideals. But one native Italian was destined to exert an influence, the constructive power of which, within the confines of his own land, equalled that exerted by Weber in Germany. The time was at hand when in Italy, the citadel of operatic conventionality and formalism, a reaction against vapidity of idea, affectation, and worn-out sentimentality was to find its leaders in Rossini, the ‘Swan of Pesaro,’ and his followers and disciples, Bellini and Donizetti.