VII
Besides the fugues and the suites there is a great deal of other and less easily defined harpsichord and clavichord music. We are not wanting in titles. We have Preludes, Toccatas, and Fantasias, also some Capriccios. These are, on the whole, of free and more or less whimsical structure. The preludes, and one thinks of the forty-eight little masterpieces of the ‘Well-tempered Clavichord,’ are usually simple and short. They are for the most part clearly harmonic music. Some are nothing more than a series of chords, notably those in C major, C minor, D minor, in the first part. The origin of this simple form of music has already been discussed; but the origin of the particular and well-nigh matchless beauty of these of Bach’s preludes can be found only in the great depths of his own genius, which here more almost than anywhere else, is incomprehensible. The subtlety of the modulations, the great tenderness and poetry of the chords, the infinite suggestion of feeling—all these within little pieces that might easily be printed on half a page, that have no definite outline, no trace of melody: we can but close our eyes and wonder.
Other preludes which are far more articulate, so to speak, are still fundamentally only harmonic music. So we may reckon the preludes in C-sharp major, in C-sharp minor, in E-flat minor, in G minor, in E major, in the first book. In these there is but a faint network of melody, usually contrapuntally treated, thrown over the profoundly moving harmonies underneath. Some others are little studies in fleetness or brilliancy of playing, such as those in D major and B-flat major; and still others are lyrical, suggesting Couperin, or even the Preludes of Chopin. It may be mentioned in passing that there is little internal relationship between preludes in the ‘Well-tempered Clavichord’
and the fugues which follow them. Nor is there evidence to show that the ones were composed for the others. Rather there is in many cases reason to believe that the preludes were composed often without any consideration of a fugue to follow. Still one cannot fail to observe, or rather to feel, a subtle affinity between most of the little pieces so united, which must have guided Bach in his selection and pairing.
Fac-simile of Bach's Manuscript of the Prelude in C major (Well-Tempered Clavichord).
The toccatas and the fantasias are on a much broader plan than the preludes. The former are essentially impressive, if not show pieces. They are usually built up upon a series of brilliant runs, oftenest scales or close arpeggios, with slower moving passages of chords and contrapuntal weavings scattered here and there. The fantasias are, as the name implies, quite free and irregular in form. Both fantasias and toccatas are for the most part distinctly in organ style. Their glory is, like the beauty of the preludes, a glory of harmony. The long, rapid runs may have lost their power to thrill ears that have heard the studies of Liszt; but the chords which lie under them have a majesty that seems to defy time.
There are several ‘concertos’ and ‘sonatas’ of which to say much is to repeat what has already been said of other forms of his music. Both are obviously indebted to Vivaldi for style, or the external features of style, as well as for form.
The idea of the concerto in Bach’s day was not the idea which Mozart planted firmly in the mind of musicians. To show off the special qualities of the harpsichord against the background of an orchestra is not often evident as a purpose in Bach’s concertos. He wrote for the harpsichord much as he wrote for the orchestra; or for the orchestra as he wrote for the harpsichord. To the solo instrument he allotted passages which required a fineness in execution of details, or passages which he wished to be softer than the general run of the music. There is a clear intention to get contrast between the group of instruments and the solo instrument, but apparently little to write for the two in a distinct style.
One may take the D minor concerto for harpsichord and a group of instruments, or even better, the Italian Concerto, for a single harpsichord, preferably with two manuals, as the perfect type. The arrangement and number of movements is well worth noticing. There are three, of which the first and last are in the same key and of about the same length and style. The middle movement is in a contrasting key, is shorter and nearly lyric in character. The scheme is perfectly balanced as a whole, and, it will be noticed, shows little kinship with the suite.
The first and last movements are in the same rapid tempo and both are treated contrapuntally throughout. Their internal structure is fundamentally tri-partite, like the fugues and the preludes in the English suites, the opening and closing sections being the same. The middle section brings out new material, but also retains suggestions of that already announced; the new material tending to take on an episodic character, like the couplets in Couperin’s rondos. This is unusually clear in the middle section of the last movement of the Italian Concerto, in which there are three very distinct episodes, one of which appears twice, quite after the manner of the Beethoven rondo. But one feature, which Bach probably acquired from Vivaldi, makes the whole procedure different from Couperin’s. This is that the main theme, either the short or long part of it which may be restated between the episodes, appears in different keys. The same feature is evident in the preludes to the English suites.
The slow movements in both the D minor and the Italian concertos are written upon a favorite plan of Bach’s. The bass repeats a certain form or ground over and over again, above which the treble spins an ever varied, rhapsodical melody, highly ornate in character. The plan is an exceedingly simple and a very old one. It may be traced in the old motets of the mensuralists of the thirteenth century, with their droning ordines; and in the favorite ‘divisions’ of the early English composers. The Chaconne and the Passacaglia are but variants from the same root. It is, of course, a simple form of variations.
This leads us, at last, to a brief consideration of what is perhaps from the point of view of the pianist, if not indeed from that of the musician, the most astonishing of Bach’s harpsichord music,—the Goldberg Variations. The story of their origin will bear repetition for the light it throws on the mood in which they were written.
A certain Count Kaiserling, at one time Russian ambassador to the court of Saxony, supposedly suffered from insomnia and nervous depression. He had in attendance a clavecinist named Goldberg, a pupil of Bach’s, who, among other duties, had by his playing to wile away the miserable night hours of his unhappy patron. Hearing of the great Bach through Goldberg, Kaiserling requested him to write some harpsichord music of pleasant, cheerful character especially for these weary vigils. Bach composed and sent back a theme and thirty variations, which so pleased the count that he presented Bach with a goblet filled with one hundred Louis d’or.
One cannot but smile; the mere thought of thirty variations is soporific. Yet an examination of them will convince one that Kaiserling must have rewarded Bach for sheer delight in the music, not for the blessed forgetfulness in sleep to which it may have been expected to seduce him. The quality of these variations is inexpressibly vivacious and charming. Bach shows himself, it is true, always the master of sounds and the science of music; but this may be taken as the secure foundation on which he allows himself for once to be the brilliant and even dazzling virtuoso.
With the object in view of enchanting an amateur who must have been, ex officio, very much a man of the world at large, Bach composed objectively. That is to say he wrote not so much to express himself as to please another. The same might be said of two other of the latest harpsichord works, the Musikalisches Opfer and the Kunst der Fuge; except that in both of these masterpieces his aim was more technical. In the Goldberg Variations he is, so to speak, off duty.
Consequently, there is in them little trace of the stern, albeit tender idealist, or of the teacher, or of the man sunk in the mystery of religious devotion. There are nine canons, at every interval from the unison to the ninth, some in contrary motion. But even in these learned processes there is a social suavity and charm. Witness especially the canon at the third (the ninth variation), and that at the sixth (the eighteenth variation). Only the twenty-fifth variation seems to show Bach entirely submerged within himself. Elsewhere he is for the most part primarily a virtuoso. In the matter of wide skips, of crossing the hands, and of sparkling velocity, he outruns Scarlatti. In fact the virtuosity of the variations as a whole is far beyond Scarlatti.
To begin with, he wrote for a harpsichord with two manuals; and in many of the variations, conspicuously in the eighth, the eleventh, the twentieth, and the twenty-third, he availed himself to the uttermost of the advantages of such an instrument. The hands constantly pass by each other on their way from one extremity of the keyboard to the other, or cross and recross. The parts which they play are interwoven in complications which, unhappily, must forever be the despair of the pianist. In such cases, of course, he may not justly be compared with Scarlatti, who wrote always for one manual.
But take for example the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth variations, which may be played on either one or two manuals. The trills and double trills in the former, together with the wide and sudden crossing of the hands, savor of Paganini and Liszt. So do the interlocked chord trills in the latter, and the airy, whirring triplets which follow them. Indeed, leaving aside a few effects in double notes, and certain others of the thunder and lightning variety which were wholly beyond the possibilities of the harpsichord, the modern pianoforte virtuoso style has little to show in advance upon the style of the Goldberg Variations.
Furthermore, if the Goldberg Variations are thus amazing from the point of view of the pianist, they are none the less so to the musician regarding their general form. There is in them positively no trace of the stereotyped form of variations of that day, which consisted either of a repetition of the theme with more and more elaborate ornament, or at best of a series of arabesques over the more or less bare harmonic foundation of the theme. The theme is for Bach but the simple germ of an idea, which, throughout the whole elaborate series, undergoes change, transformation, metamorphosis, hardly to be recognized in any of its varied forms, scarcely suggesting a unity to the work as a whole. Mood and rhythm change. New ideas sprout, seemingly quite independent of their origin. Even the harmonic foundation is veiled and altered. Bach speaks, as it were, in beautiful metaphors.
This conception and treatment of the variation form render it true greatness; endow it, indeed, as a form, with immortal life. External figurations will grow old-fashioned, or the ear will become satiated with them. But the Goldberg Variations have an inner life that cannot wither or decay. Bach’s warm imagination inspired them, gave them poetry as well as brilliance. No more modern variations are quite comparable with them except Brahms’ great series on a theme of Handel, in which, however, there is less warmth than severity, less imagination than art.
VIII
How shall Bach be placed in the history of music, in particular of pianoforte music? What part may he be said to play in the development of the art? The paternity which most composers of the nineteenth century rejoiced to fasten upon him, is hardly fitting. Bach was the father of twenty-two children in this life, but musically he died without heir. His sons Emanuel and Christian were two of the most influential composers of the next generation; but both discarded their father’s inheritance as of little service to them in the forward march of music.
Even before his death Bach knew that the forms and style of music which he had given his life to perfect and ennoble were already of the past. That he invented a simple system of temperament in order to afford himself the harmonic freedom necessary to his expression, or that he devised a system of fingering which considerably facilitated the playing of his difficult music, does not constitute him the progenitor of the new style of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The composers who followed him knew little or nothing of his music. They were far less likely to appropriate what they might have found useful in his old-fashioned art, than to meet the problems inherent in the new, which they served, with their own ingenuity. Accept, if you like, Scarlatti as the founder of the modern pianoforte style; Couperin as the creator of the salon piece. The fugue had had its great day, and so had the suite. The flawless counterpoint of Bach, with its involutions and its smoothness, was of too compact a substance to serve the adolescent, transparent sonata. His harmonies were too rich and fluent. And Bach had been but once the Bach of the Goldberg Variations.
No; Bach’s harpsichord music attained perfection. A river flowed into the sea. Further than this no art can go. Where a parallel excellence seems since to have been achieved, the growth of which it was the ultimate perfection was from another root. Bach is hardly more the father of Beethoven, Schumann and Chopin, than Praxiteles is the father of Michelangelo, or Sophocles of Shakespeare. But he left a standard in music of the complete mastery and welding of all the elements which make an art everlasting,—of form, of texture, of noble and impassioned emotion. And by virtue of this standard which he fixed, he has exercised over the development of music down to the present day a greater spiritual influence than that of any other single composer.
The harpsichord works of his great contemporary Handel are far less significant. Several sets of suites were published in London between 1720 and 1735, also six fugues for organ or harpsichord. In the third suite of the first set (1720) there is an air and variations. In the fifth of the same series is the so-called ‘Harmonious Blacksmith,’ the best known of his works for the harpsichord. It is a theme and variations. The air and variations in B-flat major which has served as the groundwork of a great cycle of variations by Brahms constitutes the first number of the second series (1733). There are in other suites a Passacaglia and two Chaconnes, all of which are monotonous series of variations. One Chaconne has no less than sixty-two varied repeats. In these works Handel shows little ingenuity. His technical formulas are conventional and in general uninteresting. The dance movements of the suites are worthier of a great composer.
Scarlatti, Couperin, and Bach are the great names of harpsichord music; great because each stands for a supreme achievement in the history of the art. It may be questioned whether, if the pianoforte had not come to supplant the harpsichord, composers would have been able to progress beyond the high marks of these three men, either in style or in expressiveness. New forms had made their appearance, it is true, before the death of Bach. These would have run their course upon the harpsichord without doubt; but it is not so certain that they could have brought to light any new resources of the instrument. These had been not only fully appreciated by the three great men, Scarlatti, Couperin, and Bach, but had been developed to their fullest extent. And, indeed, it may be asked whether any music has more faithfully expressed the emotions and the aspirations of humanity than the harpsichord music of Bach.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] An Englishman, organist at St. George’s, Hanover Square, from 1725 to 1737, when he became insane. He died about 1750. He had made the acquaintance of both Scarlattis during a stay in Italy, and was instrumental in bringing D. Scarlatti’s operas and harpsichord pieces before the British public.
[12] A learned Roman collector, born in 1778, died in 1862. Mendelssohn had the free use of his library and wrote that as regards old Italian music it was most complete.
[13] This collection is available to students in America. The sonatas contained in it are representative of Scarlatti’s style, though, of course, they represent but a small portion of his work. The collection can be far more easily used for reference than the cumbersome Czerny. Unfortunately the complete Italian edition is still rare in this country.
[14] J. S. Shedlock writes in ‘The Pianoforte Sonata’: ‘The return to the opening theme in the second section, which divides binary from sonata form, is, in Scarlatti, non-existent.’ Out of some two hundred sonatas which I have examined, I have found but one to disprove the statement. This one exception, No. 11 in the Breitkopf and Härtel edition of twenty, is so perfectly in sonata form that one cannot but wonder Scarlatti did not employ the form oftener. [Editor.]
[15] See articles by Edward J. Dent in Monthly Musical Record for September and October, 1906.
[16] See Chrysander’s articles prefatory to his own edition (Denkmäler), edited by Brahms, in the Monthly Musical Record for February, 1889, et seq.
[17] The pieces in one ordre may be in major or minor. The first ordre is in G, that is the pieces in it are either in G minor or G major. The second is in D, minor and major, the third in C, etc.
[18] That which appeared in 1713. The earlier set is not commonly reckoned among his publications.
[19] Musiciana, Paris, 1877.
[20] The origin of the title is rather doubtful. On the first page of the manuscript copy, which was in the hands of Christian Bach, of London, were written the words: Fait pour les anglais. The first prelude is on a theme by Dieupart, a composer then popular in England.
CHAPTER III
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SONATA FORM
Vienna as the home of the sonata; definition of ‘sonata’—Origin and history of the standard sonata cycle; relationship of sonata movements—Evolution of the ‘triplex’ form: Pergolesi’s ‘singing allegro’; the union of aria and binary forms; Padre Martini’s sonatas, Scarlatti’s true sonata in C; Domenico Alberti; the Alberti bass; the transitional period of the sonata—Sonata writers before Haydn and Mozart: J. C. Bach; Muzio Clementi—Schobert and Wagenseil; C. P. E. Bach; F. W. Rust.
Turning our backs upon Bach and looking over the musical marches, we shall observe many roads in the second half of the eighteenth century making their way even from the remotest confines towards Vienna. There they converge towards the end of the century. Thither comes pouring music from England, from France, volumes of music from Italy; music from Prussia, from Saxony, from Russia; from all the provinces, from Poland, from Bohemia and from Croatia. There is a hodge-podge and a pêle-mêle of music, of types and nationalities. There are the pompous oratorios from the west, light operas and tuneful trios and sonatas from the south, dry-as-dust fugues from the north, folk-songs gay and sad from the east. All whirling and churning before Maria Theresa, or her lovable son, or the intelligent courtiers about them. France will grow sick before the Revolution, Italy will become frivolous, Germany cold. Only Vienna loves music better than life. Presently up will come Haydn from Croatia, and Mozart from Salzburg, and Beethoven from Bonn. Then young Schubert will sing a swan-song at the feast from which the honored guests have one by one departed; and waltzes will whirl in to gobble up all save what fat Rossini can grab for himself.
And what is the pianoforte’s share in this profusion of music? Something of all, variations, pot-pourris from the operas, rondos and bagatelles and waltzes; but chiefly sonatas, and again sonatas.
Now sonatas did not grow in Vienna. Vienna laid before her honored guests the great confusion of music which had poured into her for fifty years from foreign lands, and in that confusion were sonatas. They were but babes, frail and starved for lack of many things, little more than skin and bones. But they had bright eyes which caught Haydn’s fatherly glance. He dragged them forth from the rubbish and fed them a good diet of hearty folk-songs, so that they grew. Mozart came from many wanderings and trained them in elegance and dressed them with his lovely fancies. And at last when they were quite full-grown, Beethoven took charge of them and made them mighty. What manner of babe was this that could so grow, and whence came it to Vienna?
The word sonata slips easily over the tongues of most people, great musicians, amateurs, dilettanti and laymen alike; but it is not a word, nor yet a type, easily defined. The form is very properly associated with the composers of the Viennese period. Earlier sonatas, such as those of the seventeenth century composers, like Kuhnau and Pasquini, are sonatas only in name, and not in the generally accepted sense of the word. The rock which bars their entrance into the happy kingdom of sonatas is the internal form of the movements. For a sonata is not only a group of pieces or movements in an arbitrary whole. At least one of the separate movements within the whole must be in the special form dubbed by generations with an unfortunate blindness to ambiguity, the sonata form. Attempts have been made from time to time to rename this form. It has been called the first movement form; because usually the first movements of sonatas, symphonies and other like works, are found to have it. Unhappily it is scarcely less frequently to be found in the last movements. Let us simply cut the Gordian knot, and for no other reason than that it may help in this book to render a difficult subject a little less confusing, call this special form arbitrarily the triplex form.