THE MUSICAL EAR[15] (1852)
By W.X. RIEHL
TRANSLATED BY FRANCES H. KING
The North German pitch differs in general from the South German—I mean the orchestral pitch.
The Viennese pitch is the highest in Germany. They go still higher, however, in St. Petersburg; the pitch in which they play on the Neva is the highest in the whole of Europe. The climax of the European concert-pitch of the present day may be represented in its three principal degrees by the orchestral tone of the three capitals—Paris, Vienna, St. Petersburg—ascending from the lowest pitch to the highest. There is no German concert-pitch, but there are dozens of different German concert-pitches—a Viennese, a Berlin, a Dresden, a Frankfurt pitch, etc., so that in the light of such distinctions even the above-mentioned division into northern and southern tone appears like a very general hypothesis. The Parisian pitch and the French pitch, on the contrary, are accepted without caviling as synonymous.[16] Italy, on the other hand, is also without a uniform pitch; as early as a hundred years ago a distinction was made there between the Roman, the Venetian, the Lombard pitch, ascending from the lower to the higher. It may therefore be said that in Rome they play approximately in the Parisian pitch, in upper Italy in the Viennese and St. Petersburg pitch. I am not indulging in any political metaphors, but in sober musical truth.
Is it possible, however, that this variety of musical tone, the historical roots of which extend back so far, may be something arbitrary and accidental? The very usage of the German language lends a significant double meaning to the word Stimmung (pitch, tone, mood). It stamps with the same name, on the one hand, the given basis upon which are built up the harmonies of music and, on the other, the harmonies of emotional life.
It is one of the most fascinating, but at the same time most difficult tasks of the history of culture to catch, as it were, the personal emotions, the pitch upon which each generation is based, in distinction from the perception of the outspoken deeds and thoughts of the age.
This task would be incapable of solution if the history of art did not furnish us a key to it. I have already shown in the preceding essay on the Eye for Natural Scenery, that the question does not concern the historical appreciation of the work of art as such, so much as the investigation of the special manner in which a generation has perceived and enjoyed the beautiful. And indeed this is more easily discerned in the case of the most fluid, subjective species of the beautiful, in natural beauty, than in the more objective artistic beauty.
In art, however, musical beauty comes closest to natural beauty, since it is in its turn the most subjective, the most general in its expression, and the most versatile in its forms. The phenomenon, so important from the point of the history of culture, namely, that each age sees with its own eyes and hears with its own ears, can therefore nowhere be more sharply observed than in the conception of natural beauty and in the fundamental forms of musical expression which happen to prevail for the time being. I will speak, therefore, of these fundamental forms and not of musical works of art, for by means of what one might call, by way of comparison, musical natural beauty, by means of the prototypes of the high or low tones, of tone-color, of time, of rhythm, etc., we can test most clearly the unconscious transformation of the musical ear in contrast to the conscious development of artistic taste.
Let us compare the orchestral pitch of the eighteenth with that of the nineteenth century. As the peoples of Europe became more passionate and agitated in public and in private life, and as our whole intellectual life rose to a higher level, our orchestral tone was keyed up higher. In 1739 Euler reckoned the vibrations of the great eight-foot C to be one hundred and eighteen to the second. In 1776, Marpurg, for the same tone, gives one hundred and twenty-five vibrations. Chladni, in the year 1802, calculated its vibrations as a hundred and twenty-eight, twenty years later as a hundred and thirty-six to a hundred and thirty-eight to the second. And since then we have, no doubt, gone noticeably higher!
We find, then, that the tone has risen most emphatically since the appearance of the Romanticists; in the days of the Classical School it remained the same for the greatest length of time. The latter was the period of the most moderate artistic expression. At present, on the contrary, we thirst for shriller and shriller tones, higher and higher singing. Even though every violin treble-string snaps and every singer's throat becomes exhausted before its time, we go on forcing the tone higher from decade to decade.
The entirely reversed relation of church-pitch to concert-pitch, which has taken place in the course of time, appears noteworthy in this connection. Even in the eighteenth century, church-pitch was much higher than concert-pitch, and surely for a reason far deeper than the mere wish to save tin on the organ pipes. For the old masters used church music for the portrayal of strong emotions, and on this account they needed the shriller pitch. Bach is much more shrilly and characteristically dramatic in his church cantatas than contemporary masters of Italian opera. Chamber and theatrical music, for which the lower, milder, more agreeable orchestral tone was chosen, was played, for the most part, only with the semblance of emotion. When Gluck and Mozart transported tragedy from the church to the stage and concert hall, concert-pitch naturally had to assume the rôle of church-pitch, and thus the former has in fact gradually become higher than the latter.
There is still another fact connected with this. Händel's operas seem to us concert-like; the arias of Bach's church cantatas often appear operatic. Many numbers of these cantatas would disturb us today in church; on the other hand we consider them exquisite religious parlor music—which they were far from being in Bach's day. We are no longer such a vehemently excitable generation religiously as to be able to endure Bach's music to its full extent in church; on the other hand, as individuals, in the family, in society we are infinitely more vehemently excitable and much higher tuned spiritually as well than were those of the eighteenth century; we want Bach in the concert hall and in the parlor. The pious and yet forcible leader of St. Thomas' Choir has been made a parlor musician by us and for us—but for his own generation he was not one.
In the last hundred years the compass of pitch of almost all instruments has been considerably enlarged in the treble. The high registers in which every ordinary violinist must be able to play nowadays would in those days have seemed too break-neck for the foremost virtuosos. Men themselves were not tuned high enough to take pleasure in such poignant chirping. The flute of the seventeenth century was a fourth lower than that of the eighteenth. In the flute and the piccolo of the nineteenth century we have again risen a third, yes, an entire octave above the eighteenth century! Our great-grandfathers called the bass flute flauto d'amore, the alto oboe, oboe d'amore, a bass viol, viola d'amore, because their ear found preferably in the deep middle tones the character of the tender, the sweet, and the languishing. Now we can scarcely play on the violin or wind instrument a love melody which does not rise two or three octaves above the normal.
The standard Italian song-composers of the first half of the last century were especially fond of using the middle register for tones expressive of peculiarly dramatic pathos, as well as for powerful final passages of arias. Our differently tuned ear demands that these tones of passion shall, as a rule, be as high as possible. The alto voice as a solo voice has almost entirely disappeared from the operas in which it formerly played so conspicuous a part. The elevated tone of our whole inner man has deprived us of any ear for the alto.
In any case we have here reached an extreme which is contrary to the very construction of the human vocal organs. Scarcely is moderate and natural compass of tone still permitted, even in a song. In every age the song-composer had been allowed to construct his melodies out of the fewest possible tones. While the elder Bach in his arias often chases the human voice in the most ruthless manner from one extreme to the other, his sons and pupils in their little German songs confine themselves to the most modest compass. Most of the later composers proceeded in the same way up to the time of the Romanticists; then the bonds were snapped, even in this respect. Schubert, on the one hand, could compose the most moderate songs, on the other, the most immoderate. It often seems (and this is also the case with Beethoven) that his fantasy rebelled against the fact that a curb was placed upon it by the natural limitation of the human voice.
This natural limitation, however, is once for all not to be done away with, and it is ignored only at the expense of feasibility. Some later Romanticists, therefore, such as Spohr and Mendelssohn, came back immediately to the comfortable middle register as the real vocal register of song. The thirst for shrill sounds had made men entirely forget that a song must be easy to sing just because it must always be sung suggestively and never be delivered with full dramatic execution. Do not our singers, who since Schubert's time are so fond of making a song a dramatic scene, feel how ridiculous it would be if a reader should declaim a song at the top of his voice like the dialogue of a drama?
In the invaluable privilege of writing for a moderate compass, a song-composer, almost alone of all composers, is provided with a means of reacting gradually upon instrumental music and of tuning anew the ear of our generation, so that it shall no longer find satisfaction in the shrill tones of extreme voice registers and the euphony of strong, easily and comfortably attained middle tones shall again be universally perceived. At the present moment our instrumental art has, in this particular, fallen under the tyranny of piano manufacturers and makers of wind instruments. When the keyboard of the grand piano has been made longer by a few keys, the composers think they are remaining "behind the times" if they do not immediately introduce these new high treble tones into their next work, and when the wind instruments have been enriched by several new valves and regulators the scores immediately grow in proportion to these keys and pistons. But does art feel no shame at having thus fallen under the dominion of trade!
The ear of the eighteenth century preferred human voices whose timbre approached closest to the violin, the oboe or the 'cello, and considered that such were peculiarly fitted for lyric and dramatic expression. The eunuch sings as if he had an oboe in his throat; it is much too harsh and lacking in brilliancy for our ear, which values incomparably higher the more brilliant, clearer timbre, corresponding to the tone of the flute, clarinet, or horn. The favorite timbre of the eighteenth century compares with that of the nineteenth as dull oxidized gold does with that brightly polished. The period of the Romanticists marks here too the turning-point of taste; Beethoven completed the emancipation of the above-mentioned wind instruments in the symphony. The modern treatment of the piano with the introduction of the perfect chord accelerated its victory at the same time. It worked favorably for the external brilliancy of tone of this instrument, while gradually closing the ears of the dilettante and the musician to the charms of a simple but characteristic management of the voice in accordance with the rules of counterpoint. Thus the layman nowadays has seldom an ear for the subtleties of the string quartet, whereas, on the other hand, our great-grandfathers would indubitably have run away from the sound of our brass bands and military music. The earlier symphonies, since they were essentially intended to bring out the effects of the stringed instruments, now seem like darkened pictures. Yet the symphonies have certainly remained unchanged; only our ear has grown dull so far as comprehension of the tone-color of the string quartet is concerned. The same full orchestra, which in those works sounded so overpoweringly imposing seventy years ago, now sounds to us simply powerful. In such symphonies, in order to sharpen our ears, which have become dulled in this respect, we have arrived at the strange necessity of doubling the parts of the stringed instruments in a simple wind instrument ensemble, so as to attain the same effect which old masters attained with a simple distribution of the string parts.
The characterization of musical keys is very strange. In different ages an entirely different capacity of expression, often an exactly opposite color, has been attributed to each separate key. In the eighteenth century G-major was still a brilliant, ingratiating, voluptuous key—indeed, in the seventeenth century, Athanasius Kircher goes so far as to call it tonum voluptuosum. We, on the contrary, consider G-major particularly modest, naïve, harmless, faintly-colored, simple, even trivial. Aristotle ascribes to the Dorian key, which corresponds approximately to our D-minor, the expression of dignity and constancy; five hundred years later Athaenaeus also calls this key manly, magnificent, majestic. D-minor, therefore, had for the ear of the ancient world about the same character that C-major has for us. That is indeed a jump a dorio ad phrygium.
What, however, was for the ancients not proverbially, but literally, a jump a dorio ad phrygium—namely, the contrast between D-minor and E-minor—is for us no longer such a very astonishing antithesis. In the seventeenth century Prinz finds the same Dorian key—which for Aristotle bore the stamp of dignity and constancy—as D-minor, not only "grave" but also "lively and joyous, reverent and temperate." This key conveys to Kircher's ear the impression of strength and energy. For Matheson it possesses "a pious, quiet, large, agreeable and contented quality," which encourages devotion and peace of mind, and, for that matter, may also be employed to express pleasure. On the other hand, since Ch. P. Schubert's theoretical procedure and since the use Gluck and Mozart have made of D-minor in dramatic practice, the modern esthetic critic finds the stamp of womanly melancholy, dark brooding, deep anxiety, in the selfsame key which for a former age was the tonus primus, the one particularly expressive of manly dignity and strength. And, to cap the climax, the ear of the musical Romanticist of our day has become quite accustomed also to hear in D-minor devilish rage and revengeful fury, as well as all sorts of demoniacal terror and dreadful, midnight, musical vampirism, as, for example, we find the Queen of Night giving vent in D-minor to the "hellish revenge" which boils in her heart, and in the Freischütz hell triumphs in D-minor. In the seventeenth century, Sethus Calvisius, speaking of C-major, the Ionian key, says it was formerly a favorite key for love songs and therefore had acquired the reputation of being a somewhat wanton and lewd melody; in his day, on the contrary, it resounded clear, warlike, and was used to lead the warriors in battle. The victoriously joyful battle hymn of the Protestant church, "A mighty fortress is our God," is therefore in the Ionian key. Calvisius himself is, however, puzzled at this incredible transformation in the conception of the selfsame thing, and adds that one is almost inclined to suspect that what is now known as the Ionian key was formerly called the Phrygian, and vice versa. The fact is, however, that the names have not changed—it is the ear which has changed. If before Calvisius C-major was the erotic key, in the seventeenth century G-major was considered so; in the eighteenth, on the contrary, when love poetry jumps from the merry and playful over to the sentimental, the musical ear likewise altered accordingly, and even before the time of Werther and Siegwart the languishing, gently melancholy G-minor was the fashionable tone, for the erotic Matheson, indeed, even goes so far as to declare that it is the "most beautiful of tones"—an opinion which is certainly characteristic of the state of nerves of the world of culture at that day. We have outgrown this tearful, tender love melody and now consider A-major to be a key especially appropriate for the love song; and already we find Don Juan declaring his love to Zerlina in A-major.
Since the days of the Romanticists, since Beethoven, our ear, in the conception of the keys also, has decidedly turned away from the more simple and natural toward the more eccentric. In the keys C-, G-, D-, F-, B-and E-flat major the eighteenth century still found characteristic peculiarities which we are scarcely able to hear at present; to the over-irritated modern ear these simple keys sound flat, colorless, and empty; instead, we have dug our way deeper and deeper among the out-of-the-way keys, and melodies which our fathers made use of only to produce the rarest and strongest emotions have already become the daily bread of our composers.
One can, in the end, escape from this chaos of differing ears only if one accedes to the opinion of old Quantz, the flute teacher of Frederick the Great, who, after an exhaustive argument for and against, comes to the conclusion that in theory nothing can be definitely decided concerning the characters of the keys; in practice, however, the composer is sure to feel that everything does not sound equally well in all keys and therefore must decide each individual case separately, in conformity with his artistic ear and instinct; I will merely add—also in conformity with the ear of his time. For Quantz, by declining to make a theoretical decision, shows that his ear had fallen captive to the Italian musical school which strove not so much to hear the characteristic in music as the simply beautiful, and, indifferent to the prevailing lively controversy over the keys, composed its melodies as was most convenient for the voice of the singer and the fingers of the accompanist.
In the first half of the eighteenth century people still possessed a very keen ear for dance music. The great majority of the dance melodies of that time are moderately animated. To our modern ear and pulse-beat, on the contrary, slow dance music seems to be a contradiction in itself; a melody which in those days inspired people and started their feet to dancing would now lull us to sleep. We desire stormily exciting dance music; our ancestors gave the preference to the gayly stimulating kind. How entirely differently constituted, how differently qualified historically, politically, and socially, was that generation in whose ears sounded the dance rhythm of the majestic sarabande, the solemnly animated entrée, loure, and chaconne, the delicate pastoral musette, the staid gliding siciliano, and the measured, graceful minuet, compared to a generation who dance the whirling waltz, the stormy skipping galop, and the furious cancan! In the opera the tragic hero could dance a sarabande, and even in choral songs of the church the ear of the eighteenth century could distinguish dance music. Matheson made (1739) out of the choral song "When we are in dire distress" a very danceable minuet; out of "How beautifully upon us shines the morning star" a gavotte; out of "Lord Jesus Christ, thou greatest gift" a sarabande; out of "Be joyful, my soul" a burrée; and finally out of "I call to Thee, Lord Jesus Christ" a polonaise, by preserving the choral melodies note for note and only changing the rhythm, just exactly in the same way as we now make marches, waltzes, and polkas out of operatic arias. What colossal contrasts of the musical ear in the course of a single century! In them is marked not only a revolution of artistic development, but a much greater revolution of the entire system of social ethics.
In several musical authors of the first decade of the last century we find the remark that the fashionable taste in music had at that time suddenly veered around; a short time before, the greatest effects had been produced with the fastest possible tempo, the most animated rhythm and figures; now slow, solemn music was the order of the day. In the seventeenth century the twelve-eighths time was mainly employed for dance music and, in general, for quick movements; in the beginning of the eighteenth century, on the contrary, this species of time conveyed to people's ears something quite different; it then became the conventional measure for the soft, yearning adagio. Händel, in his lively gigs and in his lingering pastoral love arias, gives us side by side both conceptions of twelve-eighths time. In the second half of the century this species of time, so much in vogue formerly, disappears almost entirely. Generally speaking, in the period of Haydn the sense of rhythm undergoes a simplifying process, and many species of time are done away with altogether. There is, in this particular, no greater contrast than Haydn and Sebastian Bach. Haydn generalizes the rhythms in order to attain the most telling and universally comprehensible effect possible; Bach individualizes them in order to get the most subtle result possible. Haydn and his age were satisfied, in the main, with the four-fourths and two-fourths, three-fourths and six-eighths rhythm; he simplified all conceivable rhythmic forms in such a manner that it was possible to express them in one of these four rhythms. Bach employs at least three times as many species of time and is so hair-splitting in his selections that it is more often a question of a refinement of designation, of professional coquetting with the master secrets of technique, than of any real difference in the matter. Only it must be said that this, with him, springs from a feeling for the most delicate shades of rhythm, such as has never existed since. The ear of the whole Bach age had a much keener appreciation than ours, of the subtleties of rhythm. At that time, in order to distinguish in the ball-room whether a courante or a minuet, whether a gavotte or a bourrée, were being played, a keenness of rhythmic instinct was necessary, of which in truth very little has survived in our young dancing people of today, who often have to bethink themselves whether it is a waltz or a polka which the music is beating in their ears with the rhythmic flail.
In the first decades of our century an ear for fine rhythmic nuances of dance music scarcely existed any longer, while at the same time, in concert-music, a greater wealth of rhythm was developing. Never were people inspired by more rhythmically flat dance tunes than those of the waltzes, schottisches, etc., which, for example, were danced in the twenties. The ear for the fine shades of "danceableness" in musical rhythm had at that time become absolutely dulled and had fallen asleep; now it is perceptibly awakening once more. Our polkas, mazurkas, etc., based on the clearly defined original rhythm of the national folk-dances, are promising harbingers of this. But is there not an important hint for the historian of culture in the fact that the sense for the finer dance rhythms began to die out at the time of the French revolution and was most completely extinguished in the rough days of the Napoleonic tempest and the decade immediately following, whereas in the age of Louis XIV. the ear for the subtleties of dance rhythm appears to have been most universally and most highly developed? And with the newly awakening delight in the rococo the modern ear is again becoming perceptibly keener as regards the nuances of dance rhythms.
We have grown quicker in tempo in exactly the same proportion as we have become more elevated in pitch. We live twice as quickly as the eighteenth century, and therefore our music is performed twice as quickly. Most of our musicians can no longer play even a Haydn minuet because they no longer have an ear or a pulse for the comfortable moderate movement of these compositions. The calm, easy-going andante, in which our classical age portrayed many of its clearest and purest musical pictures, is a tempo absolutely tabooed by modern Romanticists. Comodo, comodamente, i.e., comfortably, was, a hundred years ago, a very favorite designation for the manner of performing individual musical compositions. This superscription has quite disappeared from circulation in our day, and we are much more apt to mount up to the furioso than to remain quietly behind with the Comodo. The old masters also had a species of composition with the superscription "Furia," but their fury was not to be taken very seriously, for the furia was a dance. The French in former times considered the very slow trill to be especially beautiful. This kind of trill sounds to us amateurishly ridiculous, while, on the contrary, the most admired rapid trills of our best singers of today would probably have been called "false shakes" a hundred and fifty years ago. Incidentally it may be remarked that two hundred years ago people actually took pleasure in trilling with the third instead of with the second; this, in the eighteenth century, was only adhered to by bagpipers, while to our ear it has become an absolute abomination and barbarity.
A hundred years ago it was considered very daring to perform an adagio before the public in a concert hall. Contemporary musical authors utter emphatic warnings against this experiment. A sustained, seriously melancholy composition, dying away in quiet passion, was naturally just as tiresome for the opulent merry company of those days as a fugue composition is for the majority of our public. People sought to be pleasantly incited by music, not thrillingly excited; therefore comfortable slow tempo was demanded, but no adagio. If one did attempt an adagio in a gallant style of composition the player first had to render it lively and amusing by all sorts of freely added adornments, by means of passages and cadences, by improvised trills, gruppettos, pincements, battements, flattements, doublés, etc. "In the adagio," says Quantz, speaking of the mode of execution, "each note must be, as it were, caressed." In the execution of our heroic adagios it is rather required that each note shall be maltreated. From the viewpoint of the historian of culture it is an important fact that the first half of the eighteenth century had not yet acquired an ear for the sentimental, feminine adagio. The adagios of Bach and Händel are all of the masculine gender. And then what a remarkable alteration of the musical ear took place, when, in the second half of the same century, the soft-as-butter adagios of the composers of the day all at once caused every beautiful soul to melt with tender emotion! At the same time that the Werther-Siegwart period starts in literature, the layman acquired an ear for the adagio. How very slightly as yet has the intimate concatenation between the development of music and that of literature been investigated. The entire Siegwart is indeed nothing but a melting Pleyel adagio, translated into windy words. A priceless passage in Siegwart treats of the adagio. Siegwart and his school friend are playing one evening an adagio of Schwindl on the violin: "And now they played so meltingly, so whimperingly and so lamentingly, that their souls became soft as wax. They laid down their violins, looked at one another with tears in their eyes, said nothing but 'excellent'—and went to bed." The ear of the sentimental period, which had so suddenly become sensitive to the adagio, has never been so tersely branded! From that time on there was a regular debauch of adagio beatitude. In the time of Jean Paul they wrote as a maxim in autograph albums that a bad man could not play an adagio, not to mention other florid trash of this sort. Nevertheless, the moment when we acquired an ear for the adagio remains epoch-making in the history of culture.
It is not strange that, in harmony, much that formed surprising contrasts for our ancestors should, on the contrary, cause us very little surprise, or rather should appear trivial to us. [Illustration: A VILLAGE FUNERAL From the Painting by Benjamin Vautier]
But that combinations of harmony should sound absolutely false and nonsensical to the ear of one generation, which to the ear of another age sounded beautiful and natural—this is a puzzling fact. The shrill and unprepared dissonances which we now often consider very effective were thought to be ear-splitting a hundred years ago. But let us go still further. The awful succession of fourths in the diaphonies of Guido of Arezzo, in the eleventh century, are so incongruous to our ear that expert singers must exercise the utmost self-control in order even to give utterance to such combinations of harmony—and yet they must have sounded beautiful and natural to the medieval ear! Even dogs, which listen quietly to modern third and sixth passages, begin to howl lamentably if one plays before them on the violin the barbaric fourth passages of the Guido diaphonies! This historically verified alternation of the musical ear is indeed incomprehensible. It may serve, however, to help us to divine how horribly medieval dogs would have howled if one had been able to play to them—well, let us say, modulations from Tannhäuser.
The concert music of the first half of the eighteenth century was in its trivial entirety a "diversion of the mind and wit." In the same way that we now write "popular musical text-books," they wrote, in that day, directions "how a galant homme could attain complete comprehension of and taste in music," and Matheson says, not satirically, but in earnest: "Formerly only two things were demanded of a composition, namely, melody and harmony; but nowadays one would come off badly if one did not add the third thing, namely, gallantry, which, however, can in no wise be learned or set down in rules but is acquired only by good taste and sound judgment. If one wished for an example, and were the reader perhaps not gallant enough to understand what gallantry means in music, it might not come amiss to use that of a dress, in which the cloth could represent the so necessary harmony, the style; the suitable melody, and then perhaps the embroidery might represent the gallantry."
With such tailor-like artistic taste prevalent in the gallant world of that day, it is all the more astonishing that a solitary great spirit like Sebastian Bach dared to develop his best thoughts and most peculiar forms also in concert music. To be sure, as a natural consequence he had to remain solitary.
The above mentioned music "for the diversion of the mind and wit" loved short pieces, concise composition, minor measures, frequent repetitions of the same thought. The intellectual ear grasps all that easily, and amuses itself with the comparison of themes which are repeated in the same or in changed forms. We, on the contrary, nearly always listen to music with a dreamy, seldom with an intellectually comparative ear; therefore modern music is much more influential, but also much more dangerous, than the old. Musical pieces increase in length from year to year, in order that, during the performance of them, one may have the requisite time to dream. The composition has become infinitely more complicated. Formerly four measures sufficed for a simple melodic phrase, then six, then eight, now twelve and sixteen are hardly enough. Worthy old Schicht called young Beethoven a musical pig when he first learned to know the broad architectonic composition in the latter's works. He listened to the man of the future with the ear of his own past age, and in so far was quite right. To the people of the earlier period of the eighteenth century Beethoven's works would certainly have seemed unspeakably confused and bombastic, indeed like the products of musical insanity and, moreover, swarming with the worst kind of stylistic and grammatical blunders, as they did indeed appear at times even to the older contemporaries of the master. Little by little, however, it has grown to be rather risky to assert this fact, for every musical ass now argues that because his works please nobody, therefore he must be a Beethoven.
The concise thoughts and phrases of the old masters are disturbing to our dreamy musical ear—they are disquieting, they wake us up. Modern musicians are very seldom able to perform impressively this all too concise style of composition because they are no longer accustomed to interchange forte and piano and melodic expression in such short musical sentences; they only have ear and hand for very broad periods, yard-long fortes, pianos and crescendos. By far the greater part of the older chamber-music of the eighteenth century has for our ear something soberly rationalistic. Such imitative music in that age compares with modern imitative music as the painted allegories of the Pigtail age compare with the symbolical paintings of Kaulbach. Johann Jacob Frohberger, court organist to the Emperor Ferdinand III., portrayed the dangers which he incurred crossing the Rhine in an—allemande. To the ear of his contemporaries this portrayal sounded absolutely plain and intelligible. Dietrich Buxtehude described the nature of the planets in seven suites for the piano. The Hamburg organist, Matthias Weckmann, set the sixty-third chapter of Isaiah to music, and the then celebrated missionary to the Jews, Edzardi, bore him witness that in the bass he had painted the Messiah as plainly as if he had seen Him with his own eyes. We have no longer any ear for the comprehension of such rationalistically allegorized music; indeed, we can understand the ear which a former age possessed for it just as little as we can understand the euphony which the ear of the Middle Ages found in Guido's fourth-harmonies, which now even the dogs cannot put up with.
I shall break off here with the presentation of my documents concerning the alteration of the musical ear. If one tried to expatiate instead of merely suggesting, the sketch would soon grow to be a book.
There is certainly a wonderful charm in conjuring up the spirit of past ages from yellowed sheets of music, and, with the help of historical study, in quiet cozy hours, to tune one's own ear anew, so that it may once more hear in spirit the harmonies which were listened to by generations long since deceased, just as they sounded to the ear of the latter. There is a wonderful charm in searching after the most secret instinctive tones of the emotional life of a bygone world, the natural sounds of their souls, which are so entirely different from our own and which would be lost for us—since picture and word stand too far off—had they not found fixed expression in musical composition. The character-picture of the last century, as portrayed by the historian of culture, is lacking in that peculiar soulful lustre, that mysterious little luminous point which shines upon the beholder from the eye of a well-painted portrait, if such things as the knowledge of the eye for natural scenery and the ear for music of the age are not included among the features of the character-picture.