But as for the masculinely self-assertive Bach, fortunately or unfortunately not often in touch with princes, he assumed no attitude of flattery toward his employers, the penurious and unjustly-exacting town authorities of Liepsic.
Lamentable indeed is the fact that Bach was forced by circumstances into what, to one of his capabilities, must have been the most dreary, routine drudgery. Imagine Handel leaving half-penned some sublime Chorus, to toil with a dull and refractory pupil who never by any means would attain to average musicianship.
To sensitive nerves, over-tensioned through sympathy with a high-wrought emotional nature which aspires and soars towards some beauty native to another sphere, such instant drop is comparable to that of the wounded bird checked in the moment of most buoyant flight. Beethoven would none of it for, because of his bachelorhood, he was independent; but with Bach, the good father of sons and daughters to the number of twenty, it was far otherwise. Toil he must and toil he did as cantor in the school and choir-master in the church.
To certain musicians far less endowed than was Bach, the act of teaching has been but semblance of labor, and, at times, the merest farce. Behold the modern, world-flattered, fashion-sought Virtuoso of the Pianoforte, accessible only to the highest aspirant to musical renown! Behold that awe-struck aspirant ushered into the presence of the august one! He listens to the embarrassed player, yes, he the lofty deigns to listen! Ah! but will he, the great Jove of modern music, look down in kindness from his Parnassus, or will he utterly blast with the lightning of his eyes, and dumfound with the angry thunders of his mouth? Who can tell? Surely none but the great Jove himself, for his pleasure or his displeasure, like that of the ancient deity, is but matter of caprice dependent wholly upon his present mood. How the conditions which hampered the life of Bach contrast with those favoring the musical celebrity of our day! But then, the world abounds with incongruities even to the placing of the beggar on the throne and the king on the dunghill.
The poet bards of long ago, the Ossians of the North and the Homers of the South, declaimed their epics of love and war to a harp accompaniment which often must have approached free improvisation. The complex recitative of Wagner, for example, the endless melody of his «Tristan and Isolde,» purports to be the attained ideal of those elder singers; but, between the bald freedom of the old and the luxuriant freedom of the new, have obtained what Wagner considered two grave, musical mistakes: first, the evolution of fixed form originating in the primitive dance tune and eventuating in the Bach Fugue, and, second, largely due to the labors of Bach, the individualizing of instrumental music apart from vocal music once deemed its indispensable auxiliary.
Speaking without bias, it should be said that although to Bach we justly render every encomium due unto one of the most gifted masters of music, we give with full knowledge that his art, notwithstanding its beauty and excellence, is but a facet of the gem whose all of resplendence these later days are privileged to behold. Probably the perfection of contrapuntal writing was to Bach the perfection, the entirety, of great music. He would doubtless have condemned as vague and discursive much in the pianoforte and orchestral works which characterized Beethoven's middle and last period.
How he would have regarded certain liberties in the harmonic progression may be surmised. Although Bach himself was in this respect something of an innovator, he must have deemed such divergence the justifiable limit of rule-breaking. Could he have looked forward to the chief exponent of the Classical School, he might have said, «This Beethoven goes too far, even to the deliberate employment of consecutive, perfect fifths in rash attempt to produce dubious effects. Besides, he abandons the native German domain of the Fugue and debouches upon a land whereof I know not, a strange land of questionable manners and customs.»
III
Monteverde in his day dared to introduce the unprepared seventh of the dominant triad; but, in boldness he was not alone. In fact, the development of polyphony from the wholly unembellished and quite faulty chord progressions of early mediæval music, has been but a series of innovations at first condemned, then suffered, and then adopted. The earliest polyphonic writers founded their music wholly on the ecclesiastical scales derived from the Greek modes, and approved by Ambrose and Gregory. With the single exception of the Ionic scale, identical with our scale of C major, these scales were defective chiefly in one essential, to wit: in place of the modern sharped seventh, they contained the flatted seventh. This error precluded the possibility of the characterizing major third of the dominant chord in both the major and the minor. Then again, the sounding of the flatted seventh, which in modern tonality indicates modulation to the subdominant key, suggested to the old contrapuntists a triad now deemed wholly foreign to the tonic. The resulting vagueness found remedy where one should least expect it, for, in their melodies, the popular writers of both song and dance were led instinctively to sharp the seventh, and otherwise reconstruct the six defective ecclesiastical scales.