III
The construction of instrumental music on the basis of one central key with excursions or modulations into other keys for the sake of development and variety began to be understood about the middle of the seventeenth century. A very noticeable advance in this direction shows in the music of Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1644), one of the most brilliant organists before the time of Bach. Much of his music has an archaic sound to our ears. He is by no means wholly free of the old modal restrictions. But he stands as one of the pioneers in the relatively new art of organ music—a bold innovator, guided by the unerring taste of a great artist.
A romantic glory is about his name. As a player he was probably unmatched in his day, and his fame was widespread. It is said that when he played in St. Peter’s at Rome, where for many years he held the position of organist, the vast cathedral was filled with people come to hear him. One of the great masters of the next generation, the German Froberger, was granted four years of absence from his duties at the court of Vienna, that he might go to study with Frescobaldi in Rome. His compositions were published in several sets, which included ricercars, toccatas, preludes, canzonas, capriccios, and so forth. All these, not excepting even the preludes, are in the contrapuntal style which is the outgrowth of the old vocal polyphony. But they are greatly enlivened by rapid figures, scales and arpeggios as well as trills and ornamental devices. Such figures, being not at all suitable to voices but only to a keyboard instrument, mark the progress of the keyboard style toward a distinct individuality if not independence from the ancient past of vocal masses and motets, an independence which no great music has ever quite achieved.
All these sets of pieces were written in good faith for the harpsichord as well as for the organ. But in reality, except in so far as certain principles of form are valuable to all music, and a few figures of musical ornamentation are common to all keyboard music, harpsichord music profits but vicariously from Frescobaldi. His music is essentially organ music, and the development it marks as accomplished, and that toward which it points, are proper to the organ and not to the harpsichord. To the one instrument breadth and power are fitting, to the other lightness and fleetness. Inasmuch as the same distinction exists between the organ and the pianoforte at the present day, with some allowances made for improvements in the mechanism of the organ and for the great sonority of the pianoforte, which allowances affect only the degree but not the kind of differences, Frescobaldi can be said to have influenced the development of pianoforte music only by what he contributed toward the solution of very general problems of form and structure.
The same must be said of many other great organists of his and of later days, such as Zweelinck, Samuel Scheidt, Buxtehude, Bohm, Pachelbel, and others. It may be noted that after the death of Frescobaldi the art of organ-playing passed from Italy, the land of its birth and first considerable growth, to Germany. Here a great line of virtuosi added more and more to the splendor and dignity of organ music, perfecting and embellishing style, inventing new forms and making them firm. They remained loyal to the polyphonic style, partly because this is almost essentially proper to the organ with its unlimited power to sustain tone; partly because it is the impressive and noble style of music most in keeping with the spirit of the church, from which the organ will apparently never be wholly dissociated.[3]
It cannot be said that this style is in any measure so fitting to the harpsichord and the clavichord or to the pianoforte. For these, a markedly different sort of polyphony has been devised. But so long as organists alone walked in music with the power of assurance—and they were well in command of the problems of their special art while other instrumentalists and writers of operas were floundering about—so long did their influence keep instrumental music in sway.
How, then, did the great organists of the sixteenth and the seventeenth century affect the growth of pianoforte music? By establishing certain forms, notably the fugue, which have been adapted to every kind of serious instrumental music and to the pianoforte with only less propriety than to the organ; by helping to lay the harmonic foundation of music which, as we have said, is the basis for all music down to the present day and is but now being forsaken; by discovering the effectiveness of certain styles of ornamentation and runs which are essentially common to all keyboard instruments. They helped to give music a form made of its own stuff, and a beauty and permanence which is the result of such form perfected. In their workshops two of such forms were rough-hewn which proved of later service to pianoforte music—the harmonic prelude and the fugue.
We must look elsewhere for the development of other forms, less perfect perhaps, but no less important in the history of pianoforte music. Such are the rondo and the variation form. The rondo may be mentioned here because of its great antiquity. Like the ballade, it was originally a dance song, really a song with a burden and varying couplets. No form could be simpler. The burden recurring regularly gives an impression of unity, which, only in case of too many recurrences, has the fault of monotony. The varying couplets, constituting the episodes between the reiterations of the burden or main theme, offer variety and contrast. Yet, in spite of the merits of this scheme of musical structure, the form was little used by composers down to the beginning of the eighteenth century. Relatively long pieces of music, in which the rondo form could be used, were generally written in the style of fugues. Furthermore, until the harmonic art was developed and the contrast of keys appreciated, the episodes, being restricted by the old modal laws to the tonality of the main theme, would be in a great measure without the virtue of contrast.
The variation form, on the other hand, was greatly used, conspicuously so by a number of writers for the virginal in England, whose works, surviving in several ancient collections, form a unique and practically isolated monument in the history of pianoforte music. These collections have often been described in detail and carefully analyzed. The most comprehensive is that long known as the Queen Elizabeth Virginal Book, now called merely the Fitzwilliam Collection, a beautifully worked manuscript preserved in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge. Others are Benjamin Cosyn’s Virginal Book and Will Foster’s, both of which are at Buckingham Palace; a smaller book, known as Lady Nevile’s Book, and the Parthenia, famous as the first collection of virginal music printed in England.
The Parthenia was printed in 1611. But an old manuscript collection, the Mulliner Collection, contains music that can hardly be later than 1565. The activity of the English composers, therefore, during the years between 1565 and 1611 produced an extraordinary amount of music designed expressly for the virginal or harpsichord. Among the composers three stand out prominently: John Bull, William Byrd, and Orlando Gibbons; Byrd by reason of his fine artistic sense, Bull by his instinct for instrumental effect. Indeed, Bull, though a great organist, was a virtuoso for the harpsichord quite as remarkable in a limited sphere as Liszt was to be in a much broader one. In much of his virginal music there is a variety of figuration far more in keeping with the peculiar nature of the instrument for which it was written than that which is to be found in the work of his successors of any land, nearly to the time of Domenico Scarlatti.
Of all forms of musical structure, the most frequently employed in the works which make up these collections is the variation form. It is to be understood, of course, that these variations are not the variations of Bach, of Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms. These great masters subjected their chosen themes to the influences of diverse moods, as it were, from which the themes took on new rhythm, new form, even new harmony. They were born with a great instrumental technique to hand, from which to select a thousand devices wherewith to adorn and color their themes. Byrd, Bull, and Gibbons, for all their conspicuous genius, could not expand to great proportion the art of writing for domestic keyboard instruments. It was still in a weak infancy. Nor was the emotional power of music at all appreciated at that time, nor the treatment of the same theme as the expression of various emotions in turn likely to occur to the mind of the most gifted of musicians.
The variation form, then, was merely a means to spin out a piece of considerable length, which should yet have consistency and coherence. The theme itself was scarcely if at all altered in its various repetitions, but went on over and over again, while the composer added above it an ever more complicated or a more animated counterpoint. The counterpoint was for the most part conjunct; that is to say, that it progressed by short steps, not by skips. Scales are therefore far more frequent than arpeggios. The shade of the old vocal art is deep even over these composers. John Bull alone is, as we have said, at times astonishingly modern. His brilliant imagination devised arpeggio figures which today have by no means lost their effectiveness, and he could split up the theme itself into a series of lively, skipping figures.
Any theme, from the ancient plain-song or from the treasure of folk-music, was suitable to serve as a ‘ground’ to these variations, or divisions, as they were called. One comes across delightful old dance-tunes and songs popular in that day. These in themselves are full of the charm of English melody, but when harnessed, as it were, to the slow-moving counterpoint of the variation style, with its archaic harmony and lifeless rhythm, they are robbed of their spirit and their life. We have saved to us again a dead music.
Most lifeless of all, and almost laughably pompous in their rigor, are the variations on the first six notes of the scale, the so-called Fantasias on ut re mi fa sol la. Every composer tried a hand at this sort of composition. The six notes usually marched up and down the scale, with no intermission. A great deal of modulation was attempted. Sometimes the formula was gone through upon the successive notes of the scale. It was set upon its way in various rhythms, sometimes in long, steady notes, again in rapid notes, yet again in dotted rhythms. At the best the result was a display of some cleverness on the part of the composer, a bit of daring in chromatic alterations, some novelty in combinations of rhythms. It can hardly be supposed that they expressed any æsthetic aspiration. They stand in relation to the development of pianoforte music only as technical exercises of a sort.
The same may be said in some instances of the variations upon songs, but is not in the main true. Here is distinctly a groping toward beauty, largely in the dark, to be sure, but tending, on the one hand, toward the development of a fitness of style and, on the other, of a broad and varied form, the noble possibilities of which have become manifest through the genius of all the great instrumental composers since the time of Bach.
The influence of these gifted Englishmen and their extraordinary work upon the development of harpsichord music in general was probably relatively slight. A piece by Sweelinck, the famous Dutch organist, is in the Fitzwilliam collection; a fact which points to the intimacy between Holland and England in matters musical. The presence of famous English organists in Holland throughout the first half of the seventeenth century points in the same direction. But the course of harpsichord music in Holland and Germany was, down to the time of Emanuel Bach, guided by organ music. Inasmuch as perhaps the most remarkable feature of this English virginal music is the occasional flashes of instrumental skill and of intuition for harpsichordal effects from the pen of John Bull, and as these stirred to no emulation in Germany, the effect of the English virginal music as such upon the history of the special art may be set down as practically negligible. The famous collections endure, quite like Purcell’s music a whole century later, as an isolated monument of a sudden national development.
The toccata, prelude, fugue, and variations are the results of the labor of musicians during the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries to invent and improve forms of music which, as independent compositions, might impress the hearer with their organic unity, so to speak, and serve as dignified expression of their own skill and their own ideals of beauty. Of these the prelude alone, with its basis of chord sequences, is wholly a product of the new time. The others rest heavily upon the vocal skill of the past. None of them, however, is perfect. Skill in laying a harmonic groundwork of wide proportions is still to be acquired; and, so far as the harpsichord and clavichord are concerned, a sense for instrumental style and special instrumental effects has to be cultivated much further. We shall have to wait another half-century before that sense has become keen enough to influence development of harpsichord music.