Beethoven and His Forerunners

by Daniel Gregory Mason

Now, as we saw in the first chapter, the mature art of Pure Music, which may be defined as the art of combining pure tones, without words, into forms expressive of our fundamental emotional life, and congruous with one another, or beautiful, necessarily possesses three kinds of value, or modes of effect, to which we have assigned the descriptive labels “sensuous,” “expressive,” and “æsthetic.” Music has sensuous value in proportion to the actual physical gratification afforded us by the tones that compose it; it has expressive value proportional to the degree in which it excites in us, by association and suggestion, the fundamental emotions or feelings; it has æsthetic value proportional to its success in assimilating or organizing all its various effects into clear unity, thus giving us that sense of ordered richness which we call beauty. If it be true, then, that music, during the seventeenth century, under the spur of the idealistic or modern spirit, developed from a primitive into a mature art, it is obvious that this development must have rested on progress made in all three kinds of effect; and it becomes a matter of much interest to trace at least some of the chief phases of this three-fold blossoming. In the remaining portion of the present chapter, accordingly, we shall study the most striking features of the progress made during the seventeenth century in sensuous charm and in expressive power; and in the following chapter we shall examine those principles of pure music which underlie its highest, most indispensable quality of all—that of beauty, or final unity and harmony of impression.

Remarkable, in the first place, is the development the mere material medium of music underwent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The sensuous fact at the bottom of all music being the tone, the sensuous value of music depends on the kind of tones employed and on the modes of their combination, just as the sensuous value of a painting depends on the purity and richness of the pigments used and on the harmoniousness of their arrangement. So long as composers dealt either with choirs of human voices alone, or with a few crude instruments like the organs of Bach’s predecessors, the violins of the early sixteenth century, and the spinets and clavichords of the same period, they could get little variety or sonority of tonal color. But in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was made a wonderful mechanical advance. The violin, the most important of all instruments, not only because of its inimitable beauty and expressiveness of tone but because it is the nucleus of the orchestra and of the string quartet, was brought, by the Amatis, Giuseppe Guarneri, and Antonio Stradivari, the famous Cremonese violin-makers who flourished from about 1550 to 1737, to a degree of perfection which the utmost modern ingenuity has been unable to exceed. The organ, which in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was so cumbersome that each key had to be struck by the entire fist, came by 1600 to something like its modern condition, as may be seen by looking at the pieces written for it by Frescobaldi (1583-1644) and Buxtehude (1637-1707). The prototypes of the modern piano were rather slower to develop. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the clavichord was a smallish oblong box without legs, placed on a table when played; its compass was somewhat over four octaves; one set of strings had to suffice for several keys, each key being provided with a metal tangent or tongue that not only sounded the string, but at the same time “stopped” it at the requisite point for producing the desired tone. The “damping” or silencing of the strings, entrusted in the modern piano to the felt dampers, was often done by the left hand of the player. The spinet differed from the clavichord in that its tones were produced by a hard piece of quill that plucked the string. Both instruments gave but weak, short, and rather characterless sounds. But all through the period we are considering they were being experimented upon and slowly improved in sonority, variety, and color of tone.

But even after they are provided with perfected instruments, men are still much restricted in their search for lovely effects of tone unless they have also a well-developed tonal technique, or science of harmony. The tools are not enough; the use of them must also be known. As we have seen, however, the harmony of Palestrina and his school was for all its purity somewhat colorless and flat. A harmonic fabric made up exclusively of consonant chords is like a picture painted altogether with pure, light colors; it is wonderfully bright and transparent, but its very purity makes it lack force. For the sake of contrast an admixture of dissonances is required, much as shadow is required in a picture, or harshness and irregularity in a poem. The entirely sweet, soft, and mellifluous series of chords at first charms, but finally cloys.

One of the important tasks of seventeenth century composers, therefore, was to find out how to introduce dissonances in such a way as to invigorate without disrupting the fabric. Their harshness must not be obtruded, but it must be used. The Florentine reformers and their successors showed great skill in solving the problem. They learned how to “prepare” a dissonance, that is, to let one of its constituent tones appear in a consonance and then hold over while other voices moved to dissonant intervals; they experimented in harsher and harsher dissonances, admitting them only with great circumspection, but using their characteristic qualities with striking effect; and they established, as cadences, conventional formulæ of chords containing dissonant intervals, which became by mere force of repetition acceptable and familiar. In this way they introduced into the material of music a variety and range of color that consonances alone could never give. “Monteverde,” says Mr. R. A. Streatfield, “with his orchestra of thirty-nine instruments—brass, wood and strings complete—his rich and brilliant harmony, sounding so strangely beautiful to ears accustomed only to the severity of the polyphonic school, and his delicious and affecting melodies, sometimes rising almost to the dignity of an Aria, must have seemed something more than human to the eager Venetians as they listened for the first time to music as rich in color as the gleaming marbles of the Cà d’Ora or the radiant canvases of Titian and Giorgione.” If we could disabuse our minds of all emotional and æsthetic perceptions while listening to modern music, we should still find it vastly superior to the choral art of the middle ages in its purely sensuous richness. Sensuously it is a kaleidoscope of shifting effects, now harsh, now sweet, now resonant and sibilant, the next moment infinitely wooing and grateful; and through all ever changing its outlines and melting from color to color like the iridescent film of a soap-bubble.

But of course we cannot disabuse our minds of emotional and æsthetic perceptions; no human being can divest himself of such essential parts of his nature; and indeed it was even more in obedience to higher requirements than for the sake of mere sensuous richness that the musicians of the renaissance period so radically remodelled their art. The essence of their reforms is to be looked for, not in the increase of the first or sensuous value of music, but in the enhancement of its expressiveness, and of its plastic beauty.

Expression, in general, may be defined as the presentation of a feeling or idea by means of an impression. The impression may act either directly, calling up the specific idea or feeling by virtue of a long-established association between them, or more generally, by simply inducing a state of mind congruous with the expression desired, and so tending to generate it. The former is the case in verbal expression (language), where certain definite symbols, words, are immemorially coupled in our minds with certain ideas, conceptions, or feelings, so that when we hear the word we immediately think the thing. Musical expression differs from verbal expression in that in does not act by this direct arbitrary symbolism, but rather by the more subtle general process which instills a feeling by setting up its appropriate atmosphere or milieu. It is much vaguer and more general, and for that very reason far more potent. The word “love,” for example, arbitrarily denotes a certain idea, not because it is anything like the idea, but because we all agree that that word is to mean that thing.[19] An amorous piece of music, on the contrary, utters no definite symbol; it makes our heart beat faster and deeper, it makes our blood circulate, it ravishes our senses and our minds, until whether we will or not we know what it says, though for our lives we could not put its burden into words.

It is by this direct establishment in us of a congruous or favorable state of mind that the consonances of the mediæval music express religious peace; and it is no otherwise that dissonance, that powerful engine of the modern musician, expresses the inward division, the struggle and sweet torment, of idealistic states of feeling. The harshness, disagreeable in itself but essential to a process in which it is organically linked with sweetness and rest, arouses by an association of ideas a sense of the stern beauty, the tragic splendor, of the experience of the human heart. It reproduces in the sphere of sound that same series of states, that pain merging into joy, which we recognize in the sphere of our consciousness as so deeply characteristic of finite life. And so doing, it suggests or shadows forth the very essence of our nature, it echoes the utterance of our very hearts. It is no expurgated reading of the book of life: it is the full text, with all its shuddering horror and all its celestial joy.

Probably of all the employers of dissonance for the purpose of emotional expression, in the whole course of the seventeenth century, when the aims of musicians were so tentative that it required courage to brave convention, the most daring was Claudio Monteverde. “As Monteverde most frankly of all musicians of his time,” writes Sir Hubert Parry,[20] “regarded music as an art of expression, and discords as the most poignant means of representing human feeling, he very soon began to rouse the ire of those who were not prepared to sacrifice the teaching of centuries and their own feeling of what really was artistic without protest. That he should presume to write such simple things as ninths and sevenths without duly sounding them first as concordant notes[21] was so completely at variance with the whole intention of their art that it struck them with consternation. And well it might, for small as these first steps were they presaged the inevitable end of the placid devotional music. The suddenness of the poignancy which unprepared discords conveyed to the mind implied a quality of passionate feeling which musicians had never hitherto regarded as within the legitimate scope of musical art. They had never hitherto even looked through the door which opened upon the domains of human passion. Once it was opened, the subjective art of the church school, and the submissive devotionalism of the church composers, was bound to come rapidly to an end. Men tasted of the tree of knowledge, and the paradise of innocence was thenceforth forbidden them. Monteverde was the man who first tasted and gave his fellow men to eat of the fruit; and from the accounts given of the effect it produced upon them they ate with avidity and craved for more.”

Parry gives in illustration of Monteverde’s style a fragment known as “Ariadne’s Lament,” from the opera “Arianna,” so characteristic that it must be reprinted here: